Crow's Nest...

This week has been busy at the hospital. Most of the house officers have left the ward as their rotations have finished and only five of us are left. Of us five not many are inclined towards working and that leaves me and one of my fellow officers with all the work burden. I have been doing alternate day calls this week and it becomes very tough when one has to deal with all the slime and shit the trainees throw at you. Power, they say, corrupts. And this stands true for the Pakistani people more than anyone else. My senior colleagues who are hardly one or two year senior than i am sometimes start believing, by virtue of their, modest seniority that that they somehow have gained control over me and try and force orders unto me. And as we know authority of this kind irks me more than anything in this world. But even then i try and maintain a straight face just because this is the Holy moth of Ramadan and I don't want to sour the relationship. Not all of them are the same but ...

It is such an ironic and unfortunate thing that trainee doctors in Pakistan are treated in the most humiliating and degrading manner. And in turn when these doctors come out of this low level training they do the same with their younger colleagues. A trainee doctor in the federal hospital is paid a mere Rs. 10,000 in form a stipend. This amount is insufficient for anyone, let alone a doctor, who has to earn for his/her family and support them. Even a street hawker earns more than his every month. To top this all when doctors try to raise their concern about the issue they are shot down by their very own senior colleagues who are in administrative power and have by this time filled their pockets with money and are satiated. The doctors at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences let their voice out last week. All they did was stage a token protest in front of the emergency ward for 30 minutes. Lo and behold the tyrant Executive Director appears on the scene and very shamelessly tr...

Nawaz Sharif and his brother have announced their return date. Musharraf is defiant and says they will be prevented from returning to the state by a friendly ally. The public is confused, as it is, always! My concern is my personal statement that i have been trying to write since the day i was born. But it remains incomplete and inaccurate for various reasons. Why then would anyone want to read my personal statement? i have no idea. But i have to do it and i have to do it fast. I have sought help from various corners of the world and thankfully good friends have come to my rescue and agreed to review what i write. Reviews are important as they tell you what goes where and what goes wrong, altogether. I took leave from my hospital in order to complete my application for the match. I have completed about fifty percent of my work. Thankfully my documents are all there and ready to be used. For once ECFMG gave me a scare by telling me that it will take four weeks to upload my docum...

Writing personal statements is one of the most difficult tasks i have come across. It gives me a headache to talk about myself in a pretentious fashion. I have to write one soon in order to apply for my residency position this year. This sure is a uphill task. I have my first call in the department of general internal medicine tomorrow. I just don't want to do it anymore. It is so boring and monotonous that i simply don't want to do this exercise. But my hands are tied and i have no other option. I have to stick to the job and keep on doing it one way or the other. I have to drag on myself till the time i am ready to leave. You know you do not like your job when you don't go to sleep in the night knowing that if you do the day will arrive soon and you will have to depart to the work place. I therefore don't like my work at its present condition.

Lot of water has flown from under the bridges in this country. This can be said with some authority in both metaphorical and literal terms. The Red Mosque has turned into a charred remain of black, the CJ has been restored, the minister has been sent on remand, the rains have fallen like sins spewing forth from the annals of this nation eventually flooding the rivers. The incident of the red mosque was both tragic and unwanted. Innocent blood seems to be cheap in the market and our soldiers are proud to make victory signs after having proudly subduing their own. But one thing should be kept in mind. The American soldier, when he returns from Iraq or Afghanistan , has effectively become a psychopath who needs long hours of psychiatric help to bring him back to his/her senses and get war ready again. But American soldiers should feel lucky that they have a good system in place for handling the emotional consequences of the war on terror. My worry is my soldier. It is easy to sa...

I have been on a blog vacation because of various reasons. After my last post about MQM on this blog my access to blogger was blocked. I wasn't able to sign in till today. Then i have been working the work that i have been trained to work. I am doing my house job at Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS). It has been, so far, the worst experience in my life as a doctor. The experience is so bad that last night i was on call and all the time i was wondering on my luck and how it had spiralled down so badly over the past years. I was hoping that something would happen and i would die instead of being tortured again ad again and again, relentlessly. The IQ level of this nation, especially the people at the helm of affairs, is so low and pathetic that it puts me to shame and makes me wonder, when will i die! It is my firm belief that the DHQ Hospital Jhang is a much better place both in terms of learning experiences and efficiency in terms of the hospital, when we put both...

Someone pointed out something very interesting to me during the discussion of the events of May 12th in Karachi. The footage of people firing on the streets of Karachi was strange in that some of the people were wearing white shalwar Qameez well dressed bright and shiny. These were the same people who did not fit in with the rest in that they were tall build and strong stature. I have known the 'mela partymen' (MQM workers) and none of them is as well built and has good heights. I mean it is very odd to find a 'mela' with good physique. So the thought was that it was not MQM or PPP or Jamiat alone but there was someone else fighting on MQM's side. When we put these facts with the information that Talat Hussain provided us while his channel was under siege was that he could see plenty of G3 guns in the hands of the culprits firing at the building. G3 is the official issue of Pakistan Army. It is a general understanding that Pakistan Army has the single largest...