Stress Changes You; Will You?

When was the last time you put Stress at the focal point of your attention? If not in a while, perhaps a few moments to ponder over it may save a life in more ways than one. Here is why:

Stress morphs you into another person, a person you are a stranger to in your calmer moments. But over time, persistent stress also brings in irreversible and undesirable changes within. While stress has been the subject of study since decades, an overall view of it is perhaps not very commonly put across. This write up proposes to do that for you.

A Wake up Call on a Holiday !

Diwali brings in the Hindu New Year and also ushers in holidays for a large portion of people living in India. Like countless others, we also decided to holiday away from home with the family. This time it was Saputara, a hill station in the south of Gujarat, in the Dangs district.

Thanks to a contact in the Tourism Corporation of Gujarat Limited, we could book enough rooms for all of us at a distance of three weeks prior to our scheduled departure, in the Toran Hill Resort at Saputara. It is located at the entrance as it were, into Saputara. The town or whatever little of it is there, unfolds from the traffic circle at the entrance of the winding road as it reaches the plateau atop the hills.

Partly out of human tendency to do so and partly out of the staggering contrast, I could not but help compare my experience of this place 14 years back and now.

The Old Photograph

Cleaning my drawer sometime back I chanced upon a colored photograph of my departmental colleagues from the time I had just cleared my post-graduation in orthopedics.  Below the photograph was a type written note gummed to the cardboard mount of the photograph, bearing the names of the people in the photograph in all the rows, left to right, sitting and standing. What a neat method, I had thought to myself, for making sure whoever sees the photograph knows who is who.

That was face tagging as we know it now, and it was before digital photography came to help us mark people for posterity. Well I was happy for this photograph and the memories of the experiences it conjured for me.

By coincidence, the next day, a cousin sent me by email a scanned copy of an old group photograph, a black and white, with the identifying note below the photograph missing.

In a Manner of Speaking.

If you get the inflection of an "alright" right then you can tell whether the NRI speaking to you is a product of a Gujarati family from Idi Amin's Kenya or she is an immigrant with roots in Saurashtra. What one speaks shows where one comes from. However some chirps are more ominous as can be seen from the following -harmless-in-after-thought- communication. But at the time it transpired, it shocked me.

Doc Get Me Some Sleep!

One of the principal reasons a person goes to a doctor is that the ailment he is suffering from does not permit good sleep. Such a patient asked me one day, " Doc what is that I can do during the day so that I can sleep well at night?" I appreciated the fact that he hadn't asked for a sleeping pill. Also, the question struck me as being at once practical as well as profound.

Coincidentally, the next day I received an email from WebMD with a link to a slide show on how to sleep well. It is here.

However the question kept on reverberating in my mind and I thought that there has to be something even more to getting good sleep. I started with some hands on research and found that some measures indeed helped getting better sleep.

A unique and yet paradoxical finding was that there is some evidence that altruism (helping someone without expecting anything in return) helps in getting good sleep. On one hand the understanding is that you help without expecting anything and yet here you are expecting peace of mind and good sleep! Putting it another way, I thought wouldn't an altruistic act a day be a good thing irrespective of its benefit to the doer?

Another interesting finding was reading the scriptures in the original script (alright, with the translation thrown in as well) as the last thing during the day. Try it and you may find that there is no better sedative.

It is said that Dr S. Radhakrishnan, the second president of India, during his tenure as India's ambassador to the erstwhile USSR, walked out politely from a state function citing his routine of retiring to bed at 10 pm daily.
Maintaining a regular schedule turns out to be important- yes that important!

Then there are foods that can help or harm your sleep just as there are jobs that can wreck your sleep.These links are worth a look.

Perhaps, just as important as these factors happen to be for a good sleep there is also the even more important factor of what you happen to have done during the day that affects your conscience. If your heart is heavy as you hit the bed, it is unlikely that you would sleep well. This does not require any double blind studies, only blind practice.

The Fat Farce.

Jealousy, I had always been confident, was other peoples' domain. It would have remained that way but for a chance meeting between a friend and myself.

To our care givers- Doctors' real colleagues

As a wannabe doctor, a junior medical student dreams of operating upon a patient or ordering a test or writing a prescription for his future patients. It is with great aspirations that one fantasizes about these things, including but not limited to passing orders to those reporting to oneself when one thinks of being in the doctor's position. At that stage there is a vicarious pride in visualizing such a situation. For such a medical student, the sense of anticipating great personal power is there but the same is not true of the irrefutable accompanying responsibility at that nascent stage in one's career.

Well, most doctors-in-training ultimately do mature and there are very few conceited doctors that are still evident beyond a certain age. Yet, even at this mature stage, doctors are rarely, if ever, involved in administering continuous care to patients under their supervision. Doctors hardly have to administer injections or nurse their patients. Rightfully there is a support staff to do these duties. Even if once in a while doctors have to take up the role of their support staff, it is momentary and perhaps gratifying. It is considered as a feather of virtuous humility in the doctor's virtual cap.

Any parent who has nursed a sick child through the night will testify that such care giving is extremely draining. Now try to visualize that situation happening over and over again during every day you report for duty. Just how awfully exhausting could it be for the minds and bodies of the support staff. If you have ever had such a demanding situation at home, you will gladly exchange any other professional role in the hierarchy of health care for that of an immediate care giver. It is amazing to see nurses, assistants and attendants smile and greet doctors on rounds, often in quick succession, through the day.

Two groups of people should spare a kind thought for the support staff involved in any long term care facility: the doctors and the relations of the infirm. For the patient, meaningful life is restored as a result of the daily caring and loving ministrations of the support staff and not just the doctor's wise orders. Next time a nurse smiles at you, smile back to her for this reason alone. It will be a different smile, both, yours and hers!

Choosing a Residency program

Recently a senior medical student requested me to help with the decision making about the specialty to choose for post graduate training (residency). There are some people who are lucky enough to face this dilemma while quite a few are forced to make do with whatever is available after others have left with the meat.

Because there are many people in this predicament, I thought it appropriate to post this email, suitably modified for public reading, without in any way diluting the contents.This is what I had to say:

Why Do I remember Eid at Every Diwali?

The trip was progressing better than our expectations. We felt that our travel agent had planned for and arranged a nice itinerary. Though there was a last minute change in our dates, he had gone to the extent of offering us a customized tour without any extra charge at all. We felt grateful to him at every step of the trip. We felt that our trip was worth the full advance we had paid him.

The second leg of the trip was Singapore. We had to reach there by a train from Kuala Lumpur. All of us felt that Indian trains, third AC coaches onward, were better than the thing we were booked on. There was a major difference, however; smartly dressed lady ticket checking officers were doing their job professionally; it was a night train.

We arrived on Singapore railway station at about 9 am and seeing that other tourists were being escorted out by their travel agents'  local representatives, we were expecting someone to approach us with our names written on a placard. Indeed before the others were out of sight, a man in his late thirties approached us with my name on a sheet of paper in his hand.

i-fast

After the company whose name rhymes with maple came up with a series of products beginning with the first person singular pronoun things have gotten complicated: when last heard of, a contraceptive pill manufacturing company was considering a name-change for one of its hot selling troubleshooters because the small little i in their product’s name rendered itself to being perceived as an offering from the gadget behemoth. So readers are forewarned that this piece has nothing to do with gadgets or speed or abstinence from food. And, it has nothing to do with the first person singular either, though it has a lot to do with the Self.