| Before you pick up the book, here's a fair warning "" Intern: A Doctor's Initiation, by first-time author Dr Sandeep Jauhar, may rob you of several certitudes. |
| For one, most of us, yours truly included, have this childlike belief that a stay in the hospital will necessarily do us some amount of good "" fear of needles notwithstanding. |
| Then, there is this belief, quite in the manner of our faith in Santa Claus, or god, or a higher power watching over us, in the professional capabilities of our doctors (especially those with a good bedside manner, who, as surveys have suggested, tend to get sued much less, at least in the US). Intern, a memoir of Jauhar's training in a New York City hospital, demolishes many such comforting thoughts. |
| Sample this: "I had read that patients who make it out of intensive care units often liken the experience to combat. Many suffer chronic anxiety and depression; others develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Drugs like morphine and fentanyl are used not just for pain relief but to keep patients from remembering their suffering." |
| Or, " Most of my patients were going to be fine despite anything I did, and if they were going to die "" well, that was probably going to happen despite me too. Health was like the wilderness, it could only be spoiled by human intervention.... Sometimes we would give drugs just to treat the side effects of other drugs. Sometimes, we would do illogical things like give fluids and diuretics at the same time, and no one questioned it, including me." |
| If there is one thing that marks Intern and makes it such a compelling read "" despite the disillusionment you will probably suffer "" it is this tone of candour. |
| Jauhar, by his own admission, is a reluctant doctor. A PhD in physics, he almost strays into the financially more lucrative profession for a variety of reasons, including family approval and boredom with university life. |
| But once there, he is never quite satisfied. His journey (and hence the narrative) is marked by constant questioning and, not infrequently, by critique of the Western system of medicine itself. |
| It is this quality of truth at the heart of the story that makes it so readable "" more readable perhaps than a much more fabulous account of fiction, for, of course, there is no dearth of "hospital sagas" that you could pick up, romances and horrors set in hospitals, and even other more capable narratives by a handful of Jauhar's illustrious predecessors, including Dr Anton Chekhov. |
| The story deals with the trials of Jauhar's first year at residency "" the dreaded "internship"; famously difficult and pressurising for all students of medicine, including the ones in India. It is an uncommonly vivid account that many aspiring or full-time doctors will no doubt empathise with. (I have one in the family and she validates each and every one of the experiences "" the difficult patients, hardened nurses, indifferent consultants, sleep deprivation, lack of social life, even suicides by peers, et al.) |
| On the other hand, if you are far removed from such a world and its daily "" and nightly "" terrors, it is still possible to read this as an "immigrant" story. Perhaps, minus the cliched displacement angst, trademark of the genre but that's now almost passe in the age of the more confident Indian. |
| Jauhar is just that, the more confident Indian-American, even when his self-image sometimes runs contrary. While his parents, who migrated to America in 1977, feel victimised for their brown-ness in the public domain, Jauhar seems more a product of a multi-cultural society "" at least in the glimpses provided. |
| Though he marries an Indian (doctor), there are none of those typical stresses vis-à-vis arranged marriages, dating and so forth "" just a few mixed metaphors that his firmly middle-class father cautions him with! And what is most endearing is the fact that Jauhar, an imaginative, ambitious adolescent, wants a career with more "character and flair" "" to be perhaps a lawyer, or even a private detective "" than the stolid respectability of medicine affords. |
| His parents may live that great Indian dream where "non-science is nonsense" but his are the more contemporary sensibilities that most of us, even in India, can relate to. For me, the book works because of this as well. |
| INTERN A Doctor's Initiation |
| Author: Sandeep Jauhar Publisher: Penguin PAGES: 299 Price: Rs 350 |
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