Professor Gurumoorthy (we call him Guru or BGM for short) is the professor at CPDM who is advising our project. He is this really boisterous, talkative, and friendly guy who studied in the US and then came back to India to become a professor. All the students here love him and they say that he’s “god” because he’s so nice to the students. We’re really excited to be working with him!
Guru seems pretty well connected here and has arranged for us in the first few weeks to visit hospitals to observe what technologies and medical devices they are using. The plan is to observe a high-end hospital, middle tier hospital, and then a government or rural hospital to get a comparison of the various levels of healthcare in India.
For the first week, we will be visiting Fortis Hospital, a very expensive hospital that has branches all over the world. From our visits, it seemed pretty much on par with hospitals in America and has the latest technologies, was very clean, and very well run.
On the first day, we got to see the inside of an ambulance!
We observed in the ICU and emergency room on the first two days. The emergency room did not feel like there was emergency at all. Most of the patients came in with pretty minor conditions and the majority of the beds were empty. The ICU had slightly more going on. We saw doctors do a couple procedures on the patients there and most of them were on ventilators and in pretty sever conditions.
On the third day we got to follow around a neurosurgeon named Dr. Rajkumar Deshpande around. He was really cool and we got to wear scrubs and stand in the operating rooms to observe surgeries. When he wasn’t performing a procedure, Dr. Rajkumar sat down with us and chatted for a while. He was also a really boisterous guy with a big personality.
He told us about how he originally wanted to be an engineer, and when he took his college exams, he was accepted by both engineering and medical programs, the two most respected and difficult professions in India. At the time, he had no interest in medicine and had his mind set on being an engineer. But then he talked to his uncle who convinced him that he should be a doctor because he could save lives and make a difference in India. For the first few years of med school, he was really bored and didn’t do that well, and then he went to a presentation by a neurosurgeon and fell in love with neurology. He’s a pretty smart guy and took the very competitive exam for neurosurgeons and was one of the two people out of thousands accepted to the neurology program.
He then went on to study and practice medicine in the US, but because he was the son of the family, he had to move back to India to take care of his parents, because they couldn’t adjust to life in America.
The next day, I went down to the maternal and child health ward and got to watch a woman give birth by c-section. It was probably the most terrifying thing ever. The mom was awake the entire time and had anesthesia so she couldn’t feel anything from her chest down. The doctor just cut a slit along the lower side of her belly, took a clamp and pulled the baby out by the head. I never knew giving birth was so messy and gross looking.
The doctor then stitched the lady back up and on the way removed her ovaries because I think the lady was not planning on having any more kids. She already had a son who she gave birth to via c-section so that’s why her daughter had to also be done by c-section.