If there’s one thing that I adore about India, it’s that everything is done with a touch of Indian flair. I mean, even the English spoken here is particularly Indian with all kinds of different ways of saying things, as compared to how Americans say things. It’s much more different than even U.S. versus, say, Australian english. And to think, all of these years I spent “correcting” my mom’s English…. My main point is that no matter how much globalization might hit India, the people here will never adopt anything the way that it’s handed to them…they’ll adapt and modify it until it’s something exclusive to them. This is definitely the case with medicine and particularly with EM. Sometimes it feels a bit like being in bizarro world when you think of how differently things are done when there is so much infrastructurally similar in the systems…..
In case you can’t tell, today was my first day at CMC Vellore in the hospital. I’ll be rotating in the ED for 2 weeks, then a week in a community health program and then a week in the Neonatology department. I’ll go more into cultural commentary in another entry…for today, i’ll just leave you with an image of my day:
The nurses in Triage (pronounced TRY-age) sit just inside the gate to the Casualty Department, dressed in immaculate white saris covered with a dark blue smock, little plastic nurses’ hats bobby-pinned to their heads. As a ceiling fan whirs overhead, people crowd into the waiting area: Women in brightly colored saris with chains of jasmine adorning long, black braids. Men in button down shirts over loose, plaid sarongs. The first Road Traffic Accident of the day pulls in, the patient carried in off of a rickshaw. As they rush him onto a trolley (stretcher), I catch a glimpse of his face, marked with a tikka. Vellore is a hospital that sees mostly rural people, but it is actually the largest private Accident and Emergency (aka Casualty) Department in India…the contrast is so evident in the fact that while English is the language of the hospital, every single patient we saw today spoke only Tamil. Ok….more on the hospital later. gotta go for now….
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