Special Days, the Four Gora of the Apocalypse, and Choosing the Right Bucket

2nd November
Today has been a special day for Dr. Peedicayil, who’s the doctor responsible for us during our time at CMC. Charlotte and I met him on the Bumper Admin Day, when he was both friendly and efficient, the four of us all saw him again the next day, and then Toyin and Ben spent part of the rest of the week with him doing gynaecology. It would have been all of the rest of the week, except that his immune system only resisted Toyin’s chest infection for about 48 hours, so that by Thursday he was off sick. Although Toyin claims it wasn’t her, both of their coughs sounded like a tractor being started in a vat of custard, so the rest of us are pretty convinced despite his chivalrous denials. Today, then, has been special because it’s the first day he’s managed to drag himself from his sickbed to come back to the hospital. It has therefore also been a special day for Charlotte and me as we’ve got to go on a ward round with him. In the UK, with honourable exceptions, ward rounds are housekeeping – are the drug charts up to date, does the house officer know the patient’s mother’s dog’s name, when can we send them home, have they died in the night, that sort of thing. Surgical ward rounds are particularly entertaining thanks to the intense focus in recent medical education on InterProfessional Education, which is a pompous way of saying “be nice to patients”. It’s generally taught self-importantly and badly by people who give the impression that they believe Being Nice can cure the common cold. Thus a surgical ward round often includes exchanges like:
Surgeon [pointing at patient’s heavily bandaged leg]: Good morning, Mrs. Jones. How’re you feeling today?
Mrs. Jones: Oooh, terrible, doctor. My arthritis is playing up something rotten, I’ve got a terrible headache, the tea tastes like dishwater, and the food gives me wind.
Surgeon: Good, good – let’s have a look at that wound, shall we? [tears off bandages and begins prodding]
Here, however, ward rounds are an all-singing, all-dancing affair which actually involve teaching. The round today ran from 9.30 till after 1pm, and featured three consultants, three registrars, and six or seven house officers of various grades, the two of us, and the irregular sputtering of Dr. Peedicayil’s gora-infected lungs. It was fantastic – we’d arrive at a patient, watch the house officers present them at absolutely lightning speed, and then get grilled by the consultants on the particular condition. There was no malice in it, either – no one got shouted at for not knowing things – they’d just move on to the next house officer until someone got it right. The whole thing had a very schoolmarmly feel, partly because Dr. Peedicayil is the only male consultant of the three, and partly because here consultants are addressed as “sir” and “ma’am”, even when they’re being talked about, as in: “So sir is still off sick? Perhaps he’ll be back tomorrow.”
In theatre, too, when many surgeons are so focused on what they’re doing that even the good teachers often just get on with what they love doing, the doctors here take time to point things out. I’ve seen a couple of hysterectomies this week for fibroids (painful, bleeding lumps in the womb) and endometrial cancer, and in every case the surgeon has either dissected the specimen up with us and shown us the extent of the tumour or the fibroids or had a house officer (the very entertaining Arpudh) do it for us. I know it sounds trite, but it’s amazing how having someone pointing to the thickness of the wall of the womb and highlighting the white, sloughy tumour will help you remember how endometrial cancer’s staged. The long and the short is that, perhaps because there are less students per consultant here and perhaps because of something about the place, the quality of teaching is just *better*.

Toyin's impressive infection of key members of the hospital staff has meant that we have assigned ourselves nicknames based on our gora status - Ben is tall gora, Charlotte is small gora, I am sleepy gora, and Toyin's lurgee gora, all for fairly obvious reasons (I am still prone to falling asleep in warm rooms when I am bored, as happened slightly embarrassingly with the only bad consultant we've run into who essentially totally ignored my presence in outpatients).

She has been the exception, however, and the afore-mentioned Arpudh is entertaining both because he's really easy-going but extraordinarily helpful, and because he told us the famous Seven Things about Vellore.
(1) It has a Fort with no King. (The fort in Vellore wasn't ruled by any one person)
(2) It has a Moat with no Water. (and its moat is normally dry)
(3) It has Mountains with no Trees. (the mountains are, as suggested, treeless)
(4) It has a Temple with no God. (the temple in the fort was originally dedicated to a now-forgotten god, although they've shipped in a bunch of Hindu statues now, along with several metal filing cabinets with what look like names and addresses painted on them)
(5) It has a River with no Water.
(6) It has Women with no Beauty.
(7) It has Men with no Brains.
I suspect that finding this funny is more likely if you've spent some time here, but hey.

I've also run into some of the other gora here - there are a heap of Australians over, presumably because India's not that far away. They're a really good bunch, although one (Jim) told an anecdote which worried me. Just after he'd arrived, he was getting to grips with the bucket showers, and thought he'd check he was going to use the correct bucket (there are normally three in a bathroom). So he called one of the hotel staff, who took one look at the bucket full of water and the dumb gora, looked utterly horrified, and whisked the bucket away. This suggests Jim was about to shower in the bucket used for washing the left hand after using the lavatory.

I have no idea which bucket I've been using to shower and indeed shave in at our hostel, and given that Jim's story came about ten days into my stay here, I don't plan to ask.