Enough?

Of late I’ve been sitting with myself a lot
It’s not much of a practice than a sort of homecoming
It’s been a long time since I belonged to myself.

First it was to the fervour of youth
The cries of I am enough
The audacity of changing the world someday
(When all I should have was to change my ways)
Sparkling eyes and fire dreams
And oh, but was it enough!?

Second came the heartbreaks
The ones that I didn’t see coming
The ones I gave back
The screaming retorts of “You are not enough”
Hold this hand!
Marry that guy!
Solitude is loneliness!
Yet the fear of ‘them’ not being enough
Was my constant war cry

Third came love
Patient, kind, warm
The kind that comes once in a while
To take you by surprise
He screamed you’re enough
More than enough
But I am not enough, he cried
I too cried.

Fourth is this silence
It’s like a cold winter midnight
Bang in the middle of June
I can’t hear anything
I don’t play anything
Except listening to my heart beat
A hundred times over
And over
And over
Telling me that things have changed
The softness has been replaced
You have to move on (to newer things? To better things? What is better?)
And reconcile.
Sit down and feel
This emptiness
This tragedy
Of giving more than you receive
And hoping more than hope offers
And yet be grateful to have found something
In the pain of losing it
And tell yourself to begin again
But now with the glimpse of  what love taught you in it’s wake –
I am enough.

#womeninsurgery and other things ft. Happy Women’s day!

“It’s a beautiful day to save lives”, a line from the show Grey’s anatomy which took a million girls by storm and thrust them into a surgical career to follow into the footsteps of Meredith Grey – someone I would learn off much later, connect to and sometimes be appalled at because of the hot mess she is. I had no clue, not a wee bit that looking at women in surgery and being a woman in surgery required such nerves of steel.

It’s a beautiful day today to pen down a post on what my almost inconsequential baby steps into the field of surgery has meant to me. From watching my mother run back and forth from home to hospital at any time of the day gulping an entire roti in bites of four – to me repeating the same pattern and barely managing to see my beautiful 2bhk that I maintain with sky high rent while working 90hr weeks and an NBM more than my patients.

The world has changed most definitely – there are more women in surgery – you have no idea how heartwarming it is to see when someone who said they are confused whether they should take Pediatrics or Pathology (because that’s what expected of ideal female doctors to get into and build family in a nurturing role that allows them to balance home with) instead of taking surgery, finally taking the surgical branch. There are more women in Super speciality surgical branches  even though a female pursuing an Mch degree is considered as ‘too ambitious’, ‘unsuitable for family life’, ‘won’t manage home’ and deemed unfit in the marriage market because the ones who make the demands are like fiefs sitting in a bazaar bartering women by the degrees and wanting the moolah alongside the demands of “Will you step back when it’s time to plan a family?” I had met a gastrosurgeon once who told how he led a busy life with 16-18 hours surgery and was unable to contribute to home yet he expects the surgeon wife in a similarly demanding field to be okay with him coming and going as he pleased and taking a step back when needed. He proudly declared how his friends had earlier told that a surgeon wife would be unsuitable.  It was almost funny, yet ironic. I have always watched how my father despite not being from the medical field has taken an almost indulgent share in my mother’s flourishing obstetric career braving her late night labour calls and OTs by dropping her back and forth from hospital sometimes sleeping in the parking lot. Never making demands of what a ‘conventional wife’ must do. Thinking of new ways to see her grow in her career and I have realized for every brave woman in surgery there also a braver partner who supports her through it. The ones who remind them that they got their back through it all. May we all be blessed with them.

Being a woman in surgery is knowing all this and also battling the learning curve alongside. While your biological clocks keep ticking you are their struggling in the OT under the lights. Your bodies through period flow and cramps standing through 12 hour OTs performing to its best –  because in surgery neither there are excuses nor sorry. You only get one chance and you have to grab it. For women these chances are also quite rare to come by.

I did my residency in one of the prestigious colleges in Karnataka – yet there was a whispered adage in the department – your life goes smooth in this department if you are a guy. The guys clinked glasses with the professors in private and in the classes gave mind numbingly stupid answers only to get away with it and be performing a procedure alone in OT the next day. The beauty of it was your self doubt would keep  increasing exponentially while they muddled in their ignorant bliss to glory. With surgical learning curve being so steep, you were left at the very negative odds of it. There are times you wonder if you should have taken a more female friendly branch – Dermatology or perhaps OBG. Yet somehow my uncle’s face during his last days of battle with cancer kept haunting my brain and I wondered what is this field which despite having a family of doctors we could never decipher or beat. Thus began my journey into it.

Four years down the  lane do I regret being in a branch that literally sucks my soul and makes me doubt myself everyday as I begin from the scratch – learning, unlearning and learning again? Yes, most definitely yes. There are times I feel I could have taken a medical branch and just been at it. Sometimes even the most ridiculously sweet patients, stories and gooey mush my heart is  in with the countless number of compliments, blessings that my patients give me falls short when a male surgeon misbehaves with me or tells me how girls are not fit for this – when the male locker room talk in operative procedures makes me feel like running away from the crassness of it all. When you do not get the same respect as a male surgeon by the nursing staff who treat them with more gravitas. Where your talent and skills are kept to the side and you can be just reduced to someone hit on or ogled at. When sheer exhaustion takes over with the balance of personal and professional. When yet another family friend – a doctor couple – tells my parents that they made a mistake letting me get into Head and neck surgery because guys do not see me as wife material. When yet another duty, yet another long shift and yet another exhausting day at work doesn’t leave me with the headspace to talk to my loved ones and suspect if everyone is actually true? That as a girl I might have forayed into something that’s professionally exciting yet personally draining. Maybe it’s time to take a step back?

But again I hold the scalpel and get the shivers like I did the first time – the happy ones – and as I slice open a neck I realize I am doing something that none of my forefathers, family or friends have dreamt of doing. I get to see the things that no one in my vicinity has done and tell a silent prayer to that little girl who dreamt big dreams and is getting to live it. I do my OPDs and rounds and ward rounds and know that I bring an empathy that most men can’t and that’s what sets me apart every time a patient smiles and remembers my face even after days.  I get handed a oddly sketched drawing by a patient’s child who wanted to give me a chocolate or get a text from patient I discharged home happily a week back,  “thank you happy women’s day for all that you do so exceptionally” or get hugged randomly by a patient or an ajji through a difficult diagnosis and know that some way I have impacted and made someone’s life better. When I am in my night shifts or in between OTs and have someone to ask me if I ate or slept through my shifts and bear my mood swings through it all and I wonder – being a woman in surgery is not a big deal once you have the right support system for it? Having parents who nitpicked yet let me grow academically/ professionally to the fullest which many, many, many girls step back with the lack of fills my heart with plain gratitude. No one will ever understand the sacrifices it takes to be family or a friend to a female surgeon – yet people do, and I am grateful for it. I am grateful for all the mess I am and every person who takes the pain and pleasure in unraveling it. Being in an unconventional path might have taken its toll, but in the end I have been left only with the realest ones.

As women we have held ourselves back for far too long by confining ourselves to the purview of what can be done or cannot to a point we don’t even know what we want anymore. We do not take credit, we do not make our presence known, neither our sacrifices or the work or love we put into the tiniest of things in our day to day lives. Here is to speaking up more, letting our presence known and most importantly letting ourselves be okay with acknowledging it.

So, here’s to all the brave women and braver #womeninsurgery – may we know them, may we be them and may we raise them. To having the magic of scalpel in our hands.

Happy Women’s Day ! 🙂

Love,

P.

PS:

The sketched chocolate my patient’s child gave me. ❤️

PPS:

In my happy space.

An Ode to Harry Potter

It was the summer of 2002 when my uncle gifted me a set of books with a side note of, “This is the most popular book in the children’s section right now”, and my life was never the same again. A boy with a scar and two best friends coursing through the wizarding world took over a large chunk of my mindspace, which they would occupy even 16 years later. Yes, you guessed it correctly – Harry Potter!

It’s strange why I thought of Harry Potter when I read the words famous fiction book by a foreign author. I mean, I have read thousands of books in my 29 years of lifetime. I have been moved 100s of times by the words in them, so why Harry Potter? The biggest cliche of our times if you ask around any 90s kid which book have they read and loved in their childhood. Also, pretty demeaning to an avid reader like me when asked to name a favorite book at 29. Well, I could have talked about the spirited revolting spirit of a girl trapped in a regime trying to crush her personal choices in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, or the female protagonist who rises above everything to create a name for her own in Jeffrey Archer’s Prodigal Daughter; but I hesitate.

A book is measured by the world it creates and leaves it readers in, and I’m still there – I’m there in the corridors of Hogwarts navigating through moving staircases and disappearing doors. Harry, Ron and Hermione are still talking me along their adventures into the forbidden forest and forbidden corridors. I’m there when Harry has his first taste of heartbreak with Cho and I’m there where he tastes the everlasting kiss of love and family with Ginny. I’m there where Sirius falls through the veil leaving a promise of happy family to Harry hanging in thin air and I’m there when Dumbledore falls through the sharp, cold air leaving Harry vulnerable to the dark bereft of a mentor figure. I’m there through every battle and every spell; and I’m there when Voldemort fell. I’m there and here, still waiting for my letter – a ticket to Hogwarts and what I cannot have ever. The boy who lived, lives inside me; forever.

“After all this time?”

Always. ❤️

To an Indian parent,

My heart kinda aches
From not being able to tell
I love you
I care for you
I miss you

Hands that clutch too hard
Make you want to escape them soon
I guess that’s how it works
Between me and you

Yet your wrinkled hands are calling me
So are your dreams
Of being cared for in old age
By your progeny

I can feel the years that weighed you down
The wrinkles on your cheek
Dear mother, dear father
My lungs scream out from not calling to you in need

This forced adulthood
This urge to being the eldest daughter
The responsible one
The one my lil one can look upto
Is weighing on me

When all I want
Is go back to the corner of our home
Hide under your hawk eye
To all thats evil towards me.

Yet I cannot do this
Or that
Or anything which makes me look weak
Or undeserving
Of this freedom I have been coveting for far too long

To not being the frog in the wall
To not being the caged Bird that sings
To write my fate
With my own free will

So I can just pray and pray
For you both
And hope your love to stay
Till I conquer the world
Achieve all that I had wished for
Get my fill of it
And be able to come back to you
And not regret it a single bit

For I love you
I care for you
And I miss you
Even if those are the hardest three words to tell your Indian parents when you feel.

Again?

There are feelings

Solitary

Empty

I feel mostly

Yet feelings have no meaning in them.

They are mixed –

Like every other attachment I’ve felt in the past

Careless

Idiotic

Like a summer sunset you would miss out on for the accompanying heat.

But the feelings feel different this time

It’s a strange mix of yearning and guilt

Being the perpetrator and not the victim

Being the loved not the lover

Being the one who didn’t stay

The one who didn’t say.

And now that I feel this

I feel it’s good to have overlooked, over loved, over cared in the past

Because this guilt,

This burgeoning ball of guilt

Makes me feel I have fallen

With no arms to catch me,

Because I had cut them myself.

Lost in the city

The password to my phone is still my best friend’s birthday
Who still won’t call me up when she knows I’m in town
Just like the whole past year

The place on the parapet where i used to sit is filled with new plants
(More plants)
Maybe my mother found foliage as an adequate replacement to an absent daughter

Everything looks picture perfect
Yet everything feels hollow
The town that gave me birth now tells me I don’t belong here

The aunties pick on the new colors in my hair
While I shade card the green in their eyes
I feel bare even with the extra clothes I have donned to fit into their small town minds

Some ask me what I did there
Some ask me what I’m doing here (matchmaking, perhaps?!)
A year seems a unit of distance and not time, when the people you held dear don’t know how to welcome you anymore.

The roads are filled with dirt and gravel
I call it indignation
The dwellers call it slow progress to a “smart city” as the city chokes me with forgetfulness and dust

I have forgotten all the ways I lost my heart in
I’m scared to leave my house
(To lose the last resemblance to what feels like home)


When did it become like this?
When did I lose all traces of me in me?
Or is it blessed amnesia
Keeping me from the pain of the past
(Sigh)
Guess I would never know
For I tried finding myself so much in foreign cities
That I got lost in the very city I grew up in.

• 

When life gives you a 2020 –

I have finally found out the cure to my writer’s block or if I could put in in a more appropriate way the cure to my long lulls of writing inactivity even though my 2020 resolution was to write frequently, and I have ended up making it the resolution for the upcoming, right at the door 2021.

So, the cure to it is free time and a mind at rest. After a whirlwind year that has changed my life completely – I am finally bidding it a goodbye right where I started it – the city of my aspirations and inspiration – Hyderabad; with the people I love the most and I couldn’t be more motivated to come back to the greatest love of my life – writing. So, here we go, the blogpost wrapping it all up.

Admit it or not 2020 was the answer to everyone’s deepest adulting wishes – to relieve childhood once more.

2020 shuttled every grown up, self sustainable, independent, hard working, frustratingly mechanically living 20+ adult back from their stereotypical weekday pe kaam-weekend pe aaram locked down in their hometowns. A huge flush of all my IT friends “making it” in their metro lives came back to my sleepy town. My own brother left for Odisha for what was to be the longest stay after thinking that the day they left for their engineering college was the last day they got to spend time at home. I was also a recipient of the new normal for a few months then, after being shuttled out of Chennai from my carefully curated life back into my hometown – short-lived until I started my residency. It was a twist of fate for everyone. The lockdown opened our eyes to all the words that came after the “what if’s we had been keeping in our minds. It gave us all the time to be kids with pastimes that didn’t just involve chugging the maximum number of beers again. From Dalgona coffee to playing Ludo King, from jamming on my guitar on Zoom call to picking up those unread novels again; the lockdown gave us life beyond careers – making us realize what we had been missing. Making me realize what I had been missing. It gave me all the time in the world to get over the things I thought I could never get over. 2020 helped me heal.

Yet, 2020 also shuttled me to a space I had only been planning for since 2012. This was the year I got to live all my dreams. I always wanted to live and work independently in a metro city – I got to do that at the beginning of the year itself when I got a job in one of the leading corporate hospitals in Chennai and got to experience the corporate life. The sheer joy from getting a salary off my hard work, paying my own bills, getting to live a life beyond work, getting to spend and splurge on myself was a high of another kind. If that wasn’t enough, I also cleared my NEET-PG entrances surprisingly on the first attempt; convincing me of the fact that sometimes you get things when you are actively not wishing for it, so maybe the concept of destiny exists. Not only did I get a PG seat but I got that in Karnataka – a longstanding dream since a decade. I can’t explain the moments of sheer disbelief I have that I am in Karnataka doing residency! And in the college whose photos I had since and mildly wished to be in 2012. Everyday I get to don the one attire I really love – my scrubs and go off to work. Every day is a new challenge to grow better than the day before. Every day reminds me of al the milestones I have yet to reach and achieve.

I was a small town girl once who wanted to live and grow old in the same town once, within the boundaries my father had set for me – not until one day I had the courage to scale it all. Now that I have seen everything that I can have, I realize the wish list never ends. Yet you might end your peace, happiness and real joys of life in trying to achieve them.

By giving me everything I dreamt of, 2020 has also taught me how when dreams turn to reality, they might not be as dreamy as they seemed.

Life has turned for better, but it’s the adulting version of better. Everyday I wake up exhausted and tired from the day before. My sleep deprivation hits an all time high trying to juggle being a junior resident with a normal functioning human being who needs a break. Now that I am at home and can reflect on my life in Belgaum, I realize I’m far off the mark I have gone from when I started it. I was dropped off at my hostel gate with three bags and wonder-eyed; so much that I didn’t even look at my mother leaving in the cab. I made all efforts to come away from my past, not realizing that’s what kept me, me. Every day in the hospital I run around thinking everything I do is changing the world, yet now that I sit on this chair overlooking the balcony with flowers and vegetables planted by my brother, my Maa cutting up vegetables, my mom and sister trying to fit into 15″ of a phone screen because I was not granted enough leaves to be able to go all the way to Odisha and ended up coming to Hyderabad – I realized that the life of peace and love I had been searching was already here. Glamour, glitz, fame – everything attracts me since childhood – I am the kid who has always been and always loved the spotlight. Yet, the fact that I forgot the ones who put me there is dawning on me now. What’s the use of being the spotlight if you don’t have someone cheering you. What’s the use of having good days I can’t celebrate with my family? What do I do on the bad days I feel so lost wanting to run away and sleep in my mother’s lap – the safest place in the world?! I realized my folly when a patient boycotted me for not knowing his mother tongue! All the things I had left for all the things I could have not realizing I didn’t need them.

But then I cannot be that ungrateful and dissuade everything over a toxic workplace and workload that takes a toll on everyone’s mental health – when I also have few things to be thankful for. Starting off with my friends – when people said you won’t be making friends in residency they were so far off about my lot. I might not have them on the days they are also busy and broken from the department – yet I have them tugging me on food cravings, Sunday brunches and spontaneous Goa trips. When I fall sick I have someone getting food to my hostel room door and through the scary dark room ultrasound finding. Life has found a small address in hurriedly drunk coffee before morning OPD and after evening round blasting. The picturesque residency images have been replaced with barking seniors, unreasonable demands and a department that is bent on sucking your peace and blood. Yet every single day that I see my naivety slip away I also know that all of it is preparing me for a future I never had the courage to dream of. I know that when I became a part of a glorious institute I should have been prepared for the yin and yang that came with it. I know exactly who I am and how too much of goodness is also an invite for the world to feed on you like vultures – and all of this is toughening me up for the greater battle that lies after residency.

So, here’s wrapping it up – my 2020 with all it’s highlights and lessons – knowing that this year has given me the time, space and opportunity to rise ahead in life and emotion exponentially! I started this year off with red wine, long drive and UNO with the fam – and my entire 2020 has a slow melt of it. Hoping that 2021 gets us out of the lull with all the essential teachings from 2020 and adapting it to a hopefully COVID-free world.

So, when life gives you a 2020, you learn from it to make all your years better! Cause admit it, we’re never gonna be this chill ever again. So, enjoy while it lasts – exactly three more days of it.

Happy new year (in advance) folks!