All hail the medical professionals

When I was in kindergarten, everybody around me wanted to be doctors. I just stared blankly in to space  clueless as hell but also wondering whether with everybody becoming doctors, wouldn't there be a dire lack of patients if it goes on like this. Thus I chose to play the patient, patiently awaiting their high and mighty opinions and occasionally, their high and mighty attitudes as well.

Been to the hospital to donate blood recently as a very very close friend of the family was undergoing a bypass operation and me being the regular donor that I am (donated 4 times already *collars up*) jumped at the chance. Through a labyrinth of corridors and staircases and in to the blood bank we went, only to be greeted by.....well, no one. After a while what appeared to be a nurse, brows furrowed and looking as if we asked for a pint of her own blood, waddles in leisurely, not giving a rat's ass about the fact that there are three people here who has been waiting around for a considerable amount of time and starts leafing through a stack of newspaper (yes, newspapers). It was after one of us went and probed her that she decided to turn her reluctant and still frowning eye balls towards us. She looks me up and down disapprovingly as I stare at her amused, grabs a form and tells us to sit down in an annoyingly authorial tone, orders me to get on the scale and grumbles at me for being on the margin of being a blood donor (WTF?!?!?)  all in her customary eternal scowl of course. As I sat there observing her face, I wondered why even though she works at the blood bank, nobody has even considered giving her a pint or two of blood as her face clearly lacked it. I wondered if she was born that way or whether her mother had dropped her on her face as a baby that her features seemed to have locked themselves in an eternal frown of utter irritation. Slamming the blood donation form upon the table (yes, slamming) she goes about her way ruffling through the newspapers again, blatantly ignoring our presence there. Florence nightingale just swallowed her own tongue and died a second death in her grave.

Only to discover that my blood shall not be accepted since I had a tooth filling done that day.The English and the Sinhala donation forms contradicted each other while the Sinhala form confused the reader beyond rocketing golf balls and the English form only mentioned tooth "extraction" as a factor that would prevent blood donation. The nurses argued that a filling fell under "tooth extraction" category while we wondered whether they just needed English lessons, a whole new medical training or just a day in life of a living breathing human being to learn about humanity, etiquette, manners and how to talk to people, without barking at them for once.

All in all, amidst the general confusion of one less blood donor, at which one of The Darling's best friends volunteered ever so generously to fill the void which meant such a huge lot, (bless his soul). But then the doctors in charge were missing in action and The Brother Dearest proposed a raid in all the bars of the area to find them as we had been there from one o' clock and hadn't seen a tick of a doctor within those 3hrs. After complaining to the management, another doctor was appointed and the donors who had come from their offices during their lunch breaks had to apply for a half day's leave instead. And we wondered whether the hospital had suddenly been taken in to the government as we remember it being a private one where we have to pay a fortune to get the treatments done.

By all means, a bypass is a bypass and not a bloody pimple which you can squeeze out later and wait for it to dry out. One is entitled to constant guidance if not, even a written document of guidelines to follow throughout the process. The blood donors must be alerted at least a day before hand instead of suddenly being summoned within a couple of hours to be drained of one whole pint of blood as it was the case for us. The hospital is the last resort to many of us non-doctors out there and it is no secret that we go there in our moment of peril and desperation when all other means of a cure had failed. So the question arises as to how humane are these so called medical practitioners to inject lethal doses of their high and mighty attitudes to the hapless patients who have no other choice than to bear up with them in their hour of need. Florence Nightingale and Hippocrates must be turning in their graves right now.

Sri Lanka is one of the few countries which offer the enormous luxury of free education. It is the ordinary citizen who pay for one's education with their own sweat and blood, it is the common people who nourish one's mind and facilitate them with the necessary knowledge and the wisdom to aid them obtain good social status in the society, hoping that they will render a service to the community in return. If one turns around and harasses, ignores and abandons the very people who have nourished them in their hour of need, how in the devil's name are these people supposed to deal with the invalids who need their love and care? Maybe they traded their humanity with the devil for their medical qualifications. How else can you explain the lack of humanity in these individuals?

If this was the case in a so called private hospital where one has to mortgage their own house and their neighbor's house too in order to get treatments, I wonder if the medical professionals in government hospitals just wait around watching TV and eating popcorn while people drop dead all around them. Maybe things are better there, maybe not. I guess I will have to find out.  

                         Maybe that is how the word "patient" came in to being. Patients shall always be patient and patiently tolerate all the sacred, much pined after bullshit of these coveted professionals. Patients shall always be patient until one day, someone shall get fed up of all this crappy diddly-squat and decide to go plastic surgery on one of these eternally frowning faces.