A tiny flashback of my OBG postings

Disclaimer: This is just about the OBG Postings during my Internship at our hospital. No offence to other OBG people elsewhere :)

Was at a hospital today. A lady came up to me and asked, "I need to consult the Gynaecologist. Could you tell me when she would be here?". I had my college bag on and there were a group of interns or residents walking a little ahead of me. Maybe this made her think that even I belonged to that hospital. I obviously said, 'I don't know', just to get an extra question mark on her face. I didn't even know where the OBG OPD (Out Patient Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology) was.

Missed my internship at that moment. Had it been at our hospital, I would have told her anything about the Gynaecologists there. Comes when? Goes when? Yells when?, everything. Wait a sec. Maybe I wouldn't be able to tell the last one. Who knows why and when an OBG would yell!! I guess even they themselves don't know. All that the world knows is that they yell. No offence to any gynaecologists elsewhere, but in our hospital, they very much do!!

Aarrgghh!! OBG postings during internship was such a pain!!Stories of the weirdness out there used to exit every single day. They always used to be the hot topic of discussion in the Interns' common room. Come on, where else would you find an 'emergency reference' put to medicine for fever and surgery for abscess in a case of thrombophlebitis?? And to top it, make the intern run to get it done asap!! Heights!!! (For my non-medico friends, in such cases, the fever is due to the abscess and when u treat the abscess, the fever subsides on its own).

Or even, making the intern go and wake up the lab technician at 4 am to get the haemoglobin percentage of a patient with no emergency and absolutely no pallor, and then it turns out to be 10.9% (That's more than mine!).And on another day, the junior PG doesn't inform the bystanders to arrange for blood immediately for a patient with 4.2% haemoglobin, because she is waiting for the 'senior PG's orders'. Wow!!

Forget that. In surgery postings, we did reasonable monitoring for patients where things from his abdomen were so totally taken off. And here, in obg, I was made to do monitoring from 11 am to 8 pm for one single elective tubectomy case. And hey, I was not supposed to go out of the ward. The patient had gone out of the ward at 6 pm and was playing with her kid. When I called her and asked her to lie down to check her BP, she said , "I'm fine doctor. Why are you checking it so often?". Yeah right! I needed that from a patient!!

And the kich-kich that exists there? Oh, I better not talk about it! All that exists in that department in our hospital is hierarchy. Not a healthy one for sure. OBG is such a lovely subject. Just that more than half the people out there are '"kich-kich"s. Wonder how the sweet ones survive between such colleagues!

One of my friend had told me, "Until and unless you open your mouth and let those PGs there know that even you have a temper, they won't let you live in peace". That so turned out to be true. No wonder my co-interns and I were so-extra-extra-happy when we raised that "To the end of obg postings" toast when we partied the night obg postings got over. Was such a relief!

Phew!! I'd never belong there again!!

Back from the flashback,
Chandana C. Shekar