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It can’t be about the awards and accolades not when you are going to be a septuagenarian in a month’s time but it would be imprudent not to attend the felicitation invitation from the top government brass in Lucknow. Completely unexpected. She accepts this with great humility with moist eyes as she prepares herself in all nervousness to boards the heavily packed flight at the nick of eleventh hour. She has not travelled much because of her work even when she could and is terribly scared of escalators and big cities. She always found her “centeredness” on the creaky chair of her consultation room on which she puts a soft towel to sooth her butt sores because of being seated for long hours while she consults and counsels. When advised to rest or take a break she displays an endless list of Neetus ,Radhas and Seemas. Over the years only names change . Her extra short breaks coincide with bad weather mostly when her patients find it difficult to reach her. Her phone is always on as if eager to receive a call from an aggrieved lady somewhere trying to make herself understood.
For me that is plain right crazy and for her it is the norm .I tease her as the self-professed savior of needy women . A distorted belief which will not let her find relief or rest and she finds it hard to bodily cope specially now as the age is catching up. Her “work is worship” and she was never the one to go for pilgrimages. The wall opposite her consultation table had a big Mahabharata poster stating the famous “Karmanye vaadhi-kareste ma phaleshu kadachina “ and I think this was in such a direct range of her vision that it became the vision itself.
Welcomed as the first MBBS degree holder lady in the family of traditional medicine practitioners the first one being my grandmother “Shanno Devi “ she settled in a small town riddled with problems of electricity, water , poor sanitation, staff and meagerly paying smelly sweaty population . She was great at her job and gave it a hundred percent. People in these towns do not take appointments ,are loud and have never learnt to respect boundaries. Goodwill prevails and is completely acceptable. They can walk in unapologetically in the bedroom/dining halls of Bhabhi ji, Chachi ji and now Amma ji at all odd hours and she has obliged each single time without a fret or frown to attend to the ailing daughter, daughter in laws, mothers and wailing infant with pulled arms. Orthopedicians were a rare commodity even then . Her precise clinical general and gynecological acumen is like the eye of the eagle and I can vouch for that. The versions, the breech, the incomplete abortions, the foreign bodies, the raped, the poor, the deprived , the barren have all come to her. Worse were the heavily pregnant innocent girls who were brought by wailing mothers who choked while they shared their ghastly stories. Along with their treatment she had to treat their shame and assist them to hand over their babies to the childless instead of dumping them on sewage corners and dharmashalas.
This was before adoption and surrogacy laws were loose and had not turned into a bill. No USG, no fancy screening tests yet she had to deal with every conceivable gynecological mystery written in the books. Our house was full of them for quick references . She felt inadequate with her knowledge because she had to deliver more than what she trained for and she went on training herself further more and updating herself. A walk by the sea meant that she was there for a workshop for 15 days on Chennai beach learning IUI and fertility techniques before the fertility labs and treatment caught fancy. Her intelligence , hard work, patience and her perseverance for additional skills acquired over the years have got her easily labelled as the best experienced infertility specialist and gynecologist in town who has 44 years of glorious practice behind her. Our vegetable bags are her CME bags with faded dates and we have a collection from each era all we do is donate them generously. I still do not understand how many times she wants to learn and relearn eclampsia in every talk/ CME which she treats so confidently and efficiently anyway yet there is always some new armamentarium she returns with . People at her age have retired and she still isn’t willing to hang her boots not till she can go on and definitely it is not for the money alone.
Our small 8 bedded nursing home which now has expanded itself to a 30 bedded facility was the only demand she raised from my father when there was a division of ancestral property. My engineer uncle designed a small office space and a labor room with few private rooms and general ward in 1979 and Shanno Devi Nursing home was inaugurated with great fanfare and blessings from the common folk. It is situated right over the Nallah which like the LOC marks the division of municipality wards into different Mohallas. During the rains the sewage overflowed and the stench spread and she has invested more over phenyl and Dettol for the sake of sanitation than perfumes on the dressing table. The loyal Kirloskar generator was like having a BMW in a town which saw power supply cuts lasting days . Patients were instructed to carry their matchbox and candles to prepare for contingency situations along with their own bedding because hospital blankets would not suffice in cold winters. The bore well dug in the Ganga Yamuna heartland has never gone dry on us .Such has been the grace from the mother nature for years.
With the gynecology wards full she stayed on first floor to give 24 hour exclusive service to her patients and I as her daughter could never differentiate house from hospital and when she was not on duty. The cries from her labour room right below our kitchen window and the wailing of a newborn would mean a signal that our dear mother would be back soon to spend “quality time “ with us. Often we were so exhausted from mere waiting that we just slept. Me and my late sibling bore the cross for being the progeny of the busy gynecologist. She always gave us a solid reason and we fell for it. Gradually we stopped complaining. When too groggy from sedation while dealing with her migraines she would utter some medicine name and I would hop down repeating it to myself so that I would not misspell the medicine name and deliver it perfectly to the compounder, Pharmacist were unheard off. She donned hats of a housewife, mother, daughter in law and the doctor as she could handle it but it took a lot of toll on her mentally and physically. Her dedication and commitment came first even before her family . She pushed us to succeed academically sent us to hostels at an early age and saw that both her children to become doctors. We were not introduced to any other profession because she did not know anything else. She conceived of a vision of a small, affordable, patient friendly ,safe hospital in the town.
The flies, mosquitoes , narrow roads scare our dearest relatives/friends from big cities who make quick visits only to buy the exclusive Khadi and towels from this famous textile town of ours which puts in on to a global arena. With the need for emergency operations arising consistently with often a do or die situation at hand and inability to refer she asked for help from doctors from nearby towns. She was the first one to initiate practice of Cesarean deliveries in our town .The labor room would be converted to operation theatre in record time with shifting of heavy labor tables with help of patient’s relatives and the able bodied man one of them being my dad always .Blessed are those who had hydraulic OT tables and drapes in big set ups. The drapes were made from a white Thaan, colored green and then cut and tailored to size and worse still was she bore the brunt of angry surgeons who threw tantrums and were sometimes abusive. The doctors who have assisted us in past have looked at us with both humor and pity with the realization that how could someone dare to run ,exist and provide health care in such areas. But she did. Referrals to higher places meant a death sentence pronounced on women with complications and obstructed labor and they would not make it to a GTB or Safdurjung anyway. The staff would not be available to work in these places but blessed be Kerala God’s own country who provided us with Godly Shanthamma, Shuja, Annies who served and left with such simplicity and diligence. Our oldest Malayali staff nurse still grumbles how she received only 600 rupees back then and a month paid holiday was her only reward for working those extra hours. The nurses had to be trained in Hindi and their nursing skills sharpened so that they could toil silently like that with the lady Doctor for years. Annie finds it tough when I advise her to wear gloves as a part of universal protection and she asked me once why now? Nothing has happened to me till now? Protection from human beings and babies?. In her own ways her silence mocked me. At times emergency situations arose in a matter of minutes and there was no time to don aprons, slippers and gloves and to prepare. The blood stained sarees would be washed later in the middle of the night. There were no ambulance fleets available and often the cars would have to be borrowed from philanthropist businessmen in the neighborhood to shift a needy patient to the nearest city closest being Delhi .It was 55 km away. My dad had purchased a school van for us which served as an ambulance in crisis times. As we loaded half-clad women folk in their state of stupor that all my mom could do sometimes was to pray. Some died on the way for the need of blood transfusions and the few lucky ones returned to thank her for her timely referral. When I see a blood drop often at the signboards in blood banks encouraging for voluntary blood donation I fully understand the caption of “Ek boond zindagi ki”. Life is cheaper and can be lost easily in these small towns where health facilities are poor, no specialists and confusion prevails. Medicos shy away from practice because it is painful and demanding . By grace of God we have better times now at least functional telephones lines which connect us to the world now for help but imagine a hospital in those days with just a local three digit number which cannot make a trunk call. Telephone exchange were manually operated and the distress calls would not be picked up or returned specially at night.
The only parking place as against the stringent norms devised for hospitals today outside the nursing home was an empty playing ground where the bullock carts halted and the ox and the black bhainsa (bison) stood chewing grass in the sunlight while the ladies from the village delivered and taken back in carts, rickshaws, and thelas. The hastily driven buggi (bullock cart) was a live ambulance siren which meant a critical patient to be attended immediately while we would be dressed up to go for a family function on those fateful days. Often we reached late or did not make it at all.
Mum has been labelled as selfish, greedy , not caring for the family enough and ridiculed for her evergreen excuse of “Patient tha “ in family circles. She has delivered close to 10000 deliveries spanning three generations and how I wish I kept a record of how many firsts she has to her credit in the field of mother and child care .Her sleepless nights, sweaty , hungry days cannot be journaled. Her acquisition of an USG machine in recent times was like a prayer answered as it boosted her confidence to diagnose and treat quickly.When pregnant ladies arrive from far fetched villages still they come because they have heard from the elderly ladies in their town and families that Shanno is the best.
My mother gets often confused for my grandmother Shanno Devi ji herself who was a great courageous Unani doctor and a midwife of bygone era. She from her experiences knew what the town needed and brought a daring medical graduate and gifted her daughter in law to this small town for the service to the cause of woman and child care. Of course we could have done with a better fancy name but then what is in a name?
Times have changed now. We have motor able roads and working telephone lines. Blood banks are around and good referral centers are close by .Surgeons and anesthetist are eager to drop in more frequently and are friendly. The negligible number of referrals and LAMA bear testimony to our goodwork . Of course there is competition and the government guidelines are more stringent yet supportive and has acknowledged her years of service . I being my mother’s right hand assist her in her operations and we never say to our patients “Hum Maa aur bacche main se ek hi ko bacha sakten hain “. We try to save both each time every time.
