Sunday, July 7, 2013

Why we love The Medical Industry.

What's that? Every non-MBBS person wants me electrocuted?
Well, please keep your homicidal tendencies aside and note that I'm being sarcastic.

My past week had been an endless dosage of trips to the hospital, and the grim presence of needles, tubes, and white sheets triggered the idea to dedicate this blog post for our wonderful, hardworking, cheerful doctors. Now, if you are a doctor, please don't kill me, after all, I'll have to come to you to save my life anyway. Besides, doctors are human beings too! You fall sick as well, so I'm sure we all have our little tales of The Doctorate Effect to recite. And I know I'm generalizing, but I'm sure every successful Youtuber, and every successful doctor-related pages on Facebook would agree that generalizing can be so much fun.

1) Hold your breaths- If ever I am blindfolded and taken to a hospital, I would instantly recognize the place. Why? Because it smells so goddamn terrible! Medicines and sterilized floors are not my idea of the best air freshener. If I wasn't ill, now I definitely am, because I'm choking in the merciless aura of disinfectant. In fact, I have a theory that doctors advise people to use this odor to deliberately make us sick so they can make a lot of money by treating us.

2) White everywhere!- I don't get it, am I in a Tide Detergent advertisement? Or did some magical color monster decide to suck the color out of everything? Would it kill you to use a pretty flowery bedsheet? Preferably with polka dots and smileys? Why does everything have to be white?!

3) Sneeze-dryer- You are stuck waiting for the graceful presence of your doctor in a room with a zillion rotten chairs and sick people. Why, you could open a freakin beauty parlor with the number of sneezes blowing through your hair! And that one moment when you decide to drain your bladder, the doctor calls your name but doesn't matter if you rush out with toilet paper on your shoe, someone else had already gone instead, and now you have to wait for another 4839676 hours before you can have your turn.

4) The Doctor language- Honestly, doctors should stop working in hospitals and become language scientists or whatever it is called. Because I have no clue what they are talking about!
What the doctor said: How many motions did you pass today? Having any hard stools?
My answer: Well uh, doc I used motion to walk into your office, and no, your stool is quite comfortable.
What the doctor meant: So how many times did you poop today?
Seriously, what am I supposed to say!? I don't know about you, but I have never heard anyone use the phrase "hard stools". I mean, imagine people talking like that in a normal conversation. "Hey man, how was your poo?" "Oh, the motion was okay but the hard stools made the excretion uncomfortable."

Crap. I can't stop laughing. iuwerhuierhhjahahhahahahhahaha

5) The Beautiful handwriting- Does that say 'antibiotics' or 'potato'? You go like "Hmm, that looks like 'potato'", and you go home, have very nice servings of potatoes, and fart in your doctors face when he blames you for misreading. (Potatoes cause flatulence, in case you didn't know)

God, why can't I stop using poop references?!!!?! oh godddd stoppp

6) The bazillion tests- So you've been having a little hand cramp for a few days and you go to the doctor hoping he will tell you to get a hand massage or something, so you can take a day off from your school/work with your little prescription and chill in a Thai spa.  But noooo! You suddenly are being told to get a blood test, a urine test, an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, an IQ test, and an ultrasound. I know it is always safe to get everything checked, but seriously, I don't understand how my uterus and the cramp on my hand is related. Would the ultrasound decide that my 'hard stools' are magically causing this weird pressure on my nerves which travels all the way to my hands and I'll be in labor through my hand when I'm thirty? What is this sorcery?!

7) The lying nurses- So there you are, laid out on a bed like a lab rat, waiting for your semi-conscious surgery. You look at the nurse with dilated eyes and ask "Will this hurt", and she says "Not one bit." And the next thing you know, this whole bunch of people are choking you on some tube going down your throat and you're screaming with pain and you look at that nurse who lied to you, and her face is suddenly a very nice troll face.

8) The overly frank doctors- But sometimes, you need to be lied to, so that you won't die of shock or elope with another patient or whatever. "Hey doc, will I survive?" "I am afraid not. You will die the death of a filthy dog ran over by a herd of ballerina elephants." And then you're like "WHAT?! How much time do I have?!" "The time I take to eat a Big Mac when I'm starving." Suddenly, you're looking for that nurse who lied to you that time.

9) The moments before surgery- There you were, laid down on the bed like a lab rat as usual, freaking out as hell, and suddenly there are doctors stuffing things into your mouth, giving you random shots, whacking your butt, covering you in sheets, and you're just staring at them. One of the doctors try to ease the situation by asking you about your school life and you are left with the futile attempts of trying to speak through the mouthguard and squinting at the bright light wrecking your retinas. Does he not know it is bad manners to assume that I'm mean when I struggle to reply as he punches my voicebox? And it doesn't even matter if you had started your nice recital of how your best friend lost her fake eyelash when she tried out for soccer at school, because suddenly, there's blackness. There goes the mystery story of the MIA eyelash and the sorrow of my comrade in the unfinished sentence before the knockout of general anesthesia.

10) The loud patients- So after the surgery, as your sedation is wearing off and you feel like a drunk junkie, you hear a groan every 2 minutes and realize there is a person on the bed next to you with one eye covered with an eye patch, a hairy leg reaching for the stars, clad in a brilliant and sickening white of a billion plasters and bandaids. But I won't deny that I myself have been the annoying neighbor patient a couple of times. I was told that I, too, groaned and said some nonsense about how I devotedly fancied touching beaks of penguins (I have never touched a penguin's beak, let alone any beak before and I so don't know why I said that), and something about beak restoration movement.

11) The pills- When you visit your doctor again, he gives you a whole list of pills with wacky names and schedules in his oh so beautiful handwriting, and bids you farewell (after whacking your butt one more time, of course). Ah, just what I wanted. Isn't it the best way to enjoy your meals? 2 pills before eating a parantha, 3 after eating, and 1 when you have eaten roughly 25% of your food.  And what's that, I realize that I'll miss the smell of sterilized floors and medicines when I walk out? Oh, don't you worry about that, with the amount of pills you are given, you could advertise for hospital air fresheners!

12) And then when you get home- Just as you were about to walk out the door, the doctor yells "OH AND BTW. I HAVE CUT OUT A BIT OF YOUR LARGE INTESTINE FOR RESEARCH". Perfect. Now you can go home and have rather pleasant nightmares about the hole in your digestive system and the joy of wondering if some of your poo will go into your kidney and liver as well.

But even if we loathe them, when you're lying there, all well and alive and that once khadoos doctor is smiling down at you, you know they are white-coated phoenixes who heal with blades instead of tears. I mean, I can't even imagine how these people can be in the depressing rooms of a hospital, fixing your body up like fixing your TV, for I, with even a meager sight of blood, would totally faint and probably drool inside the patient's opened up body. So kudos to you, doc! And here's your patient, signing out.