Bedside Manners (Intentions Unquestioned)

You might be a person with good habits – regular morning and evening walks, moderate eating habits, exercises to an extent, and the like.  Regardless, sometimes problems that grow within begin surfacing. I felt pain on my right knee two months ago. 

“Over 50% of the cartilage and menisci have worn out,” said the Orthopedician, looking at the X-ray report. I have heard ‘cartilage’ earlier, but not the other one. When communicating with patients, most doctors forget they are talking to commoners, not their peers.  

“Not to worry, many in your age group often lose 70%,” he reassures. How does that help me, I wonder. 

News spreads like wildfire – and faster in SFV. Well-wishers begin rushing in saying, long time no see. No issue, most welcome. But, not with Ratnadeep’s khakhi envelope of apples, oranges or pears. 

Some visitors have a knack of taking over the conversation even before you had completed two sentences explaining your problem. “Oh, this is nothing. My……..,” and embark on an trip narrating encounters of their friends and relatives. 

Yet another who has probably undergone the ritual, asks me to confine myself to just three workouts, and begins to demonstrate them. Alas, none of these finds a place in my physiotherapist’s list. “One red capsule in the morning and one white tablet at night, and I was fine in ten days,” he recapitulates, with no clue to what pharmaceutical substances they contain.  I remembered my WHO days. We had a book on good prescribing practices. It explains how the symptoms may be the same in different cases, but the medicines differed in each case. If my memory serves me right, the young lady in her twenties had monthly-cycle problem, for the taxi driver in his 30s it was an onset of tuberculosis, for the lady in her early 50s it had to do with menopause, and the senior citizen had discontinued his antibiotic course halfway and there was a relapse. 

“I say, just undergo an intense Ayurveda massage treatment. You will be fine,” suggests another on a visit from Kerala. Point well taken, but I would prefer to try out my course of treatment, I told myself. To him, I just nodded with a smile.

This visitor, my close friend, had two motives. One to enquire about my health, and the other, and the more important one, to persuade me to go on an outstation trip together, which we have not done for quite some time. Not sure he has sold the idea to me, he turned to my wife to convince her. “I tell you Sundaram has no problem whatsoever. He just needs a change. Let’s all go to Coimbatore. En route I will hold him at stopovers to restaurants. We will stay for a couple of days, and you two can stay with his sisters and brother for a few days more and have a real change.” We have agreed in principle. 

Pending that, I have sworn to take a walk, both in the morning and evening, in the Pine-Maple-Cedar-Ebony park area when it is more frequented, partly to let my friends see me in one piece, but more importantly to pre-empt their visits with apples and oranges - and make me feel more sick than I am.

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