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What visiting a hospital can teach a writer about human condition

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Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Palash Krishna MehrotraOct 23, 2016 | 11:30

What visiting a hospital can teach a writer about human condition

Earlier this month I spent some time at the Medanta hospital, Gurgaon. I wasn't admitted there myself - a loved one was, but the experience brought home the simple fact we all know but forget to reflect on: that human life hangs by a slender thread.

The business of daily life makes us not remember a vital truth - that to wake up healthy everyday is nothing short of a miracle.

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When one walks into a hospital for an emergency operation, even in the role of an "attendant" accompanying the patient, one steps outside of life for a brief while.

Several metaphors come to mind. One gets off the running train and lets the train pass. One takes stock of the new surroundings.

One hovers in the sky, like a plane on take-off, and looks down at the city below, a city one is abruptly not a part of anymore but of which one was a bona fide citizen, just a few hours ago.

Or maybe it's akin to leaving your sentry position in the pouring rain of everyday life and stepping into a warm dry well-lit room.

For the period you are confined to this room, you itch to be back in the rain, the same rain that seemed too much to bear when you were actually standing in it.

Twenty-first century hospitals like Medanta create a successful illusion that you are not in a hospital. There is no smell of disinfectant hanging in the corridors, no dim white tube lights.

The lobby or reception area resembles a shopping mall or an airport. You eat a pizza from the Pizza Hut counter, sip on a Costa Coffee.

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For a second, you are suspicious. This new city that you have landed in seems even nicer than the one you left behind.

Reality descends on you as you begin ascending the floors in the hospital lift. The higher you go the more sombre it gets. When you walk into the ICU you realise for the first time: I'm in a hospital, not on a vacation.

By now the outside world has begun to sink into total irrelevance. So many things that make up the traffic of our conscious and subconscious minds - these self-driving Tesla cars - drive themselves to the horizon and fall off the cliff. Ego, envy, competition, click-bait headlines, Facebook likes and WhatsApp groups cease to matter in an instant.

You are on a table-top mountain. You are sitting across the table from the doctor, Dr Praveen Chandra, stent man extraordinaire, who explains the condition and the solution.

I nod my head and absorb the information that he's giving us: the jumble of pipes that is the human body and how he intends to fix what is essentially a plumbing defect.

Spending some time with a surgeon or an "intervention specialist" and watching what she does puts human professions and vocations in perspective.

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As Robert Louis Stevenson writes in the preface to Underwoods: "There are men and classes of men that stand above the common herd: the soldier, the sailor, and the shepherd not infrequently; the artist rarely; rarelier still, the clergyman; the physician almost as a rule. He is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization; and when that stage of man is done with, and only to be marvelled at in history, he will be thought to have shared as little, as any in the defects of the period, and most notably exhibited the virtues of the race.

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The higher you go the more sombre it gets. (Photo credit: Google) 

Generosity he has, such as is possible to those who practise an art, never to those who drive a trade; discretion, tested by a hundred secrets; tact, tried in a thousand embarrassments; and what are more important, Heraclean cheerfulness and courage. So that he brings air and cheer into the sick room, and often enough, though not so often as he wishes, brings healing."

Saving human lives has to be the most valuable service you can provide humanity. Compared to this, writing is the most useless.

But then there is also fashion design and installation art and the footballer; that thought somehow always makes me feel better.

But hold on; there is a link between literature and medicine. In mythology, Apollo was the god of poetry and medicine; Pallas Athene was the goddess of poetry and healing.

Historically, there's been a long tradition of writer-physicians and writer-surgeons. One explanation is that no one has experience of human life up-close as much as doctors do.

The list of writer-doctors is too long to mention here but it can be divided into two broad categories: those who have written about their experiences as doctors as non-fiction - like Oliver Sacks and Atul Gawande, and those who have applied their human experience of practising medicine less directly to poetry and fiction.

The Czech poet Miroslav Holub, the American poet William Carlos Williams and the Russian short-story writer Anton Chekhov didn't necessarily write about medicine but it would be fair to say that their writing wouldn't be what it is if they weren't doctors. The clinical gaze, it has been said, has much in common with the writer's eye.

Meanwhile, in the hospital lobby, far from the spotlight of the operating table, the patient's relatives are talking among themselves not so much about the philosophical aspect of death as the practical ones.

A young man, who looks to be in his 20s, tells me that in the Indian middle class one child is usually settled abroad and is absolved of all responsibility. This person, he tells me, then makes up for the guilt by becoming the family's ATM.

There is talk of responsibility in the elevator too. By now everyone has become familiar with the voluble mother-son couple who have decided to deal with the stress by shouting loud insinuations at each other.

The peasant mother grumbles loudly in Punjabi: cooked for you, paid your fees, nursed your fevers you nalayak ingrate son.

The son looks heavenwards and says: "So I'm here, pushing your wheel chair. What are you complaining about, mother?"

Last updated: October 23, 2016 | 11:30
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