LIFE IS UNCERTAIN- MY EXPERIENCE

It was a calm wednesday morning when i got to my hospital, a little late as usual(half an hour is not all that late!).I met this person who comes to the hospital every morning to deliver paper RAMU who in the most sarcastic way possible said 'late as usual,huh?'. I wanted to break his teeth and tell him to mind his own business but for my image in the hospital i just flashed a innocent smile and went into the casualty and sat reading THE TIMES OF INDIA. 8 15 in the morning and a recruit of freshly fried vadas are stacked in the canteen, the aroma of which is not just confined to the canteen but comes to the casualty which is my area of work. being a gastronaut of the highest order resisting a serving of vada sambar is out of question, so i lifted 100kgs of myself against gravity from the chair and walked to the canteen.(mess would be more appropriate as indeed the state of the canteen is a real mess!!!!). I took my usual seat in the canteen which is the DOCTORS part of the canteen. My usual serviceboy wished me good morning in his own unexplanable style and i just responded in the most graceful way with a nod.1 plate of vada was in front of me in less than a minute hot and steaming vadas with almost boiling sambar. you cant ask for more!!i perform this everyday ritual of cleaning the spoons which come with a lot of soap and what not on it... I was all set to dig the spoon into the vada with a surgeons pecision and excise the right size which would produce the perfect taste when i heard a husky male voice saying saaar which is the karnatak way of telling SIR. I put my spoon down on the plate and looked back to find my male ward boy SATISH next to me. "saaar, ondu patient untu,emergency'(meaning there is a patient, emergency). I had no option but to desert the vada sambar and rush to the casualty.on entering the casualty i found a person in the mid 20s wearing a black trouser now stained with blood and mud. shirt was looking like a designer white shirt with lots of red abstract on it but apparently it was blood on a plain white shirt.. patients bystander turned to me and said that a speeding truck had hit this person who was on his cycle on he national highway which is just less than a kilometre from my hospital. I then went to the patient and got the shock of my life.. it was RAMU, our own paper boy. He lay there with a depressed fracture of the frontal bone and crush injury on the skull.it did not require an Einstein to understand that the truck tyre had ran over his head. Jomon, the staff nurse on duty said sir pulse feeble, BP 30/10 .'what?'start an intravenous line fast 2 canulas 3 way rush as much as fluid as possible... call some other staff from counter and immediate hemmacel , DNS,RL start... we have to rescusitate him fast... and in the least tiome possible alll instructions were taken care off... Jomon record BP i said... 20 systolic ,no diastolic he said .. we tried everything we could for the next 16 minutes 20 seconds in the intensive care unit. at the end of it there was nothing i could do but declare his death. The next half an hour was one of the toughest of my life as i was still not coming into terms with reality that the person whom i had seen barely an hour back hail and hearty then was reduced to a dead body... it was tough, every 2 seconds that sarcastic smile and face use to pop up in front of my eyes....i dragged myself to the canteen and attended the vada ... it was tasteless or were my senses not working well????? LIFE IS UNCERTAIN