Art of comfortable living

Narinder Arora

Life is a continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations.” For a hassle-free uneventful life adjustments have to be made to a certain degree to avoid trouble. 

One day, on the ward rounds, a patient of fracture did not have his X-rays and case file available by the bed side. My colleague was sensing an opportunity to operate on a case guaranteed to give excellent results just like plucking a low-hanging fruit. 

But not finding the x-rays there, he confronted the patient. The patient informed him that the X-rays had been taken by his attendants to show to some private ortho surgeon to explore the possibility of getting operated at a private hospital. 

Certainly, this situation pricks your self-esteem and hurts your ego when a patient admitted under your care tries to seek opinion from elsewhere as if in your make-believe world some attempts at mutiny have started.

“Tell your attendants to see me in the OPD whenever they come back,” the doctor told the patient.

After about one hour a nicely dressed gentleman along with the patient's case file and x-rays came to the OPD to meet the doctor concerned.

The doctor in a very aggressive tone thundered, “Why did you take away the x-rays and the case records from the bed side? This is hospital property.”

The gentleman, after listening to the doctor replied, “Sir, we want to take this patient to a private ortho surgeon and please allow us to have a discharge.”

Now this was so difficult to digest. Maintaining an aggressive posture, he again raised his voice, “But you do not have the right to take the records away and, by the way, what do you do?”

The gentleman replied very politely, “Sir, I am a DSP with the Vigilance Department.”

This statement was like a bolt from the blue to the doctor and he got totally deflated as he sensed that he might have ruffled the feathers of an officer of undisputed might.

The most difficult and embarrassing thing in life is when you have to eat your own words.

Hiding his nervousness, the doctor lowered his tone, composed himself and said with a contrived smile so as to lessen the impact of the previous aggressive posture, “The patient has all the right to seek a second opinion and he is at full liberty to get operated by a surgeon of his choice.” He then instructed a junior doctor to make the discharge slip immediately and he himself saw the gentleman off the OPD area.

To avoid landing into controversy one should have good art of taking a U-turn and “eating your own words is good diet to lose some ego”. I have always learnt the doctors don't have much argument whenever they are pitted against patients or their relatives as  “the  patient is always right”. In the instant case the doctor’s stand was not defensible right from the beginning but he salvaged the situation for himself. “Sometimes you have to shut up, swallow your pride and accept that you’re wrong. It’s not giving up. It's growing up.”