The Common Man of Healthcare

The Common Man of Healthcare

– Dr Asha Deshmukh, Nasik

This is about George, my cousin.

George and I grew up in different cities and only met during summer holidays. In that little time that we spent together, I noticed how George’s voice seemed like sunshine and how wise and gentle he was to everyone around him, and so I looked up to him, literally! He was a decade older than me, was tall for his age and extremely warm and understanding. Grandpa believed that George was special, because he understood people.

He had this passion that was hard to grasp, the fire to bring about change in the right places, the verve to think out of a box, and the ability to stay calm and smile. Why George did not get into medical college was a mystery to me, until I understood that he was way ahead in his heart to what structured education could teach him.

Nevertheless, he maintained his love affair with biology, it seems. He would question the microbes, the food chain, diseases and how little we are doing to prevent, leave alone cure it.

One day, we were lazily walking uphill after lunch, near the pineapple fields, laughing and joking like teenagers would. When we stopped for a sip of water, he noticed a small hut, next to us. In it was an old man on a bed, with a dog next to him. There was nobody else around.

George went into the hut and asked him “Who is with you appachan (grandfather)?”

“Nobody” the old man smiled. “Can you please give me a sip of water? I am thirsty”.  

George readily helped the man sit up and gave him water. The man’s body was warm. He seemed to be running a fever.  

George frowned, he wanted to help him.

“How can healthcare be placed in the hands of only the medical personnel? It should be rightfully placed in the hands of the community!”, he declared.

Thereafter he joined a palliative care unit, to help around as a volunteer, during the weekends and sometimes even after college, talking to patients and their families, dropping off an elderly patient to the nearby hospital for his monthly check up, or reading out bed time stories to a little child to diminish her unbearable pain of the newly diagnosed cancer of the bone. With his honest presence and his willingness to commit his time at the old building of the palliative care facility that waited for him, as much as he waited to be inside it, spending time with the inhabitants, George won everyone’s heart.

“I am going on a home visit” he announced to my aunt one day.

“Where? And to do what?”, his parents asked.

 “I have been a volunteer with a renowned palliative care unit here, for the past couple of months, I wish to devote more time to it”, he said.

His father asked him, “But you are not a doctor, how then can you be a part of patient care?”. He looked up puzzled and disinclined to the whole idea.

“As a volunteer there are so many things that I can do, Father”, he said firmly. George’s journey in palliative care began then.

He continued to serve in little known remote hamlets, sometimes helping the NSS volunteers from college to help repair a leaky roof in the rains, or painfully stick around with a nurse, holding a tray while she cleaned a wound with maggots of a patient of an advanced oral cancer.

Somehow, he could speak to people, and more importantly listen to them actively, at all times. The calm in him acted as a catalyst for solutions to many seemingly impossible or regular problems associated with palliative care.

He would reach hospitals to help patients’ make tough decisions associated with home care, organ donation and community engagement with cleanliness.

“One must always be an example to what one wants to see as a change in the society” he explained, as he collected plastic bags and bottles, to be disposed off, on our way home from our walk.

There was NEVER an iota of doubt when it came to service, never a question of not being a doctor.

What he could, he would always do.

That was the greatest inspiration for me also to start being a student volunteer in palliative care.

As George would always say, “Health is everybody’s business.”

And today after many years have passed, I undeniably agree to what he said. The patrons from the community are torchbearers for a harmonious healthcare system.

George was just a common man, but his interactions with patient care were extraordinary because he found the time to be involved in something that he considered to be his calling.

I am sure that there are many such volunteers waiting to be unearthed, each a precious diamond in their own right, maybe thinking, I’m just carbon, how can I shine in that expensive necklace?