OCT-B-5
A RAINY DAY CANCELLATION OF THE MORNING
RUN
PRECEEDS OUR SECOND FULL DAY CLINIC
IN THE WEST BENGAL DISTRICT
FROM OUR KALIM PONG BASE AT SOOD’S
GARDEN
Nonstop, heavy twenty four hour rain—an unprecedented happening, not occurring in October in any amount of rain in the experience of “Sid Sood” that owner and manager of Sood’s Garden Retreat. It aborted the run for which I was prepared early this morning and dampened the very long ride we had out to the village of Pedong, in a “bloc” of 60,000 people according to the BMO (“Bloc Medical Officer”) upon our arrival and formal reception this morning, notwithstanding the drippy inconveniences of trying to set up our station with a downpour going on. We were treated to the royal reception and the katis layered on us for our efforts.
We then proceeded to see patients at the rate of 180 before lunch—another very formal affair in which the whole community had cooked the spicy and variety dishes for us, and all had to eat. This ceremony may have cost us dearly, since at least four of our members have gone to their rooms with diarrhea and nausea starting after this lunch.
We saw another undiagnosed gastric cancer, and a woman on the nursing staff with a parotid tumor which was in the tail of the parotid—an easy treatment for me to make. I had also seen a tragic young man who had a tetanus shot four years ago. Immediately after that, he started to lose the use of his right hand, which was now a claw. He had apparently got the tetanus shot right into the radial nerve as it wraps around the humerus, and the total interruption of this radial nerve had condemned him to the loss of his dominant hand.
And, we had a baby! A primip had gone into labor after being examined and gave birth to a 3 kg baby girl, probably the only one in history here ever attended by an obstetrician, simply because we had one in our entourage. There were “unsterile conditions” talked about by some of the medical students, but I pointed out that f birth had to be attended by sterile environments (as it seems to have been in the last two generations) it certainly could not have been a requirement or else the human antecedents of each one of us could not be here in the unbroken chain.
I discovered that my roommate, coincidentally from Michigan in the Flint are, has a further coincidence—he was born on January 19 (although forty years later than I) on the day he says marks the anniversary of the day the front hooked cantilevered bra was developed and released by its designer, Howard Hughes. Remarkable coincidences indeed!
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