My well-wishers and grateful ex-patients wonder why I fail to turn up at their parties despite their pleasand insistent invitations. While my wife usually gets fed up with the adulation and importance I usually get from satisfied patients or their relatives at parties, some sour ones are educative enough.
I once found myself squeezed between two defence officers at a party at the MB Club. They seemed jovial, friendly and in “high spirits” and had many interesting stories to tell. Their demeanour however changed once they learnt that I was a doctor at the SGPGI. The conversation then turned to how terrible places hospitals were, how uncaring the staffs were and how one of them had lost a relative at SGPGI after a heart surgery due to, what they perceived, neglect.
My feeble protests that I belonged to a different speciality , that patients sometimes do die after heart surgeries in spite of the best treatment, just as jawans do in a war despite all armours, and that the utterance of one rude nurse should not denigarte a whole hospital, fell on deaf ears. When he ordered his 3rd “Patialla peg”, I realized that it was time to move to a friendlier (or less hostile) table.
The other demand that we face in parties is of medical consultations. When a stranger flashes a smile and moves close with his drink in hand and I reciprocate eagerly hoping to strike a new good friendship, the discover the motive is often quite different. . After the preliminary pleasantries he often dives staright into his irregular bowels, his children’s adenoids or his father’s enlarged prostate, asking for my cell number and that of my colleagues, seeks an assurance that I will help him circumvent the tedious lines at SGPGI, and a guarantee that all will turn out well when he does!
In another party, I found my industrialist friend’s wife proudly displaying a painting that she had picked up at Sotheby’s. A beaurocrat guest, not to be left behind, jumped into the fray with his story of buying an art piece at a London auction house (you are not supposed to ask in a party how he acquired such money!). And that is how the converstaion went, till he discovered that I was a doctor at SGPGI, when it turned to hospital bashing, discussion on the terrible state of medical ethics, the lack of facilities at government clinics and so on. When I thought I had had enough, I mustered up the courage to ask him if he had ever been a secretary in the health department. His flushed face indicated that he had. I then let the next obvious question dangle “What, sir, did you do to improve the state of these terrible government hospitals when you were in power?” That party ended on a sombre note.
It is little surprise then that doctors mingle more amongst themselves and shy away from “mixed parties”
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