My first volunteering experience — doing something good :)

The First Day

We had discussed this for weeks… I go to an IGCSE curriculum school which encourages students to experience the real life by volunteering. so I decided to do this at a place where I feel I could do some help and be happy about it. Since I am keen in pursuing medicine in the future I thought this will be best to volunteer in a hospital. So going back to that day morning. My mum woke me up at 6:30am. My holidays were going on and I was wondering why on earth I was up so early. She asked me to hurry up as we had to leave in half an hour and I was like “why? where do we have to go now? it’s so early!!” and my mom said, “how did you forget?! your voluntary services at the hospital begin today silly”. Then I ran to the bathroom and got ready in 10 minutes. I lost my appetite due to over excitement of starting something new but I force some food down anyway.

It was a half an hour drive with the radio on full volume with the hope of it calming me down, with no success so we approached the entrance, where there was a long queue as the hospital gave free treatment. The security would not let us in so we had to call a known doctor inside to come and get us. When we finally got in I was rushed to the place where I would be working. The term for volunteers like me is a “sevadal” or a person who does “seva”. So then they Showed me what my job was and it sounded pretty simple. Go get the patient cards, call them in, check the weight and then send them to the doctor for their checkup. I worked in the pediatrics department, so I got to see a lot of cute kids and it was fun. But it was also sad on how people were coming from all over India (mostly Bengal for some reason) and most of them were because their kid was not eating properly or they were assuming that their child had Typhoid or pneumonia. And usually, it was just a normal cold that could have been treated in a nearby city/town. The only thing that was useless was writing the patient details in a notebook as this was time-consuming and nobody EVER looks at that book.Instead, they could use DocEngage, which is a healthcare software owned by my parents (Asha Satapathy & Ahimanikya Satapathy). DocEngage will help them streamline the process and plus a lot of paper would be saved :)

We started working at around 9am (when the doctor finally showed up), and finished at 12ish and I was happy when I was done. I felt like I had achieved something, helped someone and also got something out of it. I was very tired at the end and slept through the whole ride home and for three hours after that (wow! was I Exhausted or what?). And good deeds pay off as what goes around comes around, sleeping tight is a blessings…

My 7th Day

Today no senior Sevadal has come and I called my mom to assist me and she gracefully agreed.

So far we helped 13 patients and doctor was also asking us to take patients to blood test room, x-ray area, pharmacy etc. and if they have to go to another department then we need to take them to the next destination. The process is little inefficient and we made it little better to reduce the tension of the volunteers. For example, they write the patient details in a book and take their weight and do not know who went inside so again you have to ask them when they come back who is who and what is their token number, therefore it was creating so much confusion. Here is what we changed, we made one patient see the doctor and we take the weight for the next person in line. When sending them into the doctor’s room we tick them off the checklist that we made so when they go out no process needs to be followed and we got a lot of extra time on the following day due to our efficiency in handling the patients waiting to see doctor.

The place is pretty packed and people are desperate for treatment. Most of them don’t really speak English, Hindi or Kannada, which make it survival in Bangalore very tough apart from dealing with their sickness.

One case is a family from north India who somehow were convinced that the baby has tuberculosis because she was not behaving normally and kept gasping for air at times when in the village. So they decided to go to a well-qualified doctor in Bangalore. When examined by the doctors in hospital it was put to diagnosis that the baby had a hole in the heart. But to come this conclusion it took them a month to figure out because the patient being pushed from one department to another to evaluation. A collaborated approach could have saved time for doctors and the patient.

There is another case where the 11 yr old has a mole on the cheek and it is growing. She was usually not hungry at all and typically was taking her first meal by 3pm. Doctor suspected it could be hypothyroid so he asked for a blood test. I have seen many kids with hypothyroid disorder in last 2 days and looks like the thyroid test for the newborn is missing and hence kids are coming in a large number with this condition.

Seen a baby with mental illness from Bengal who has fallen off from byclecle a while ago and the fall damaged his brain. So his control over his legs is lost and he can’t talk properly.

Many children are coming with a learning disability to the general hospital and get forwarded to the NIMHANS which is a mental health hospital. I suspect that mental health awareness is missing in India. May be because of that people are jumping hospital to hospital and trying to find out what is going on with their child. Months are spent on transferring between hospitals and waiting for days and days to understand what is the problem. It will be good to have more mental health hospital and make it accessible to poor people so the diagnosis can be done in the right time and treatment can be provided in the early stage. I finished for the day with arranging all files in order. Today we have seen 45 patients and it was tiring but fun.

Day 13

By now you get my daily work at the hospital… same old same old. so now I will write about few of the cases that I saw… There was a case of a child from Bhubaneswar(Odisha) and they knew there was something wrong with their kid so they brought him to Bangalore after a lot of consulting in Odisha itself. It turned out that he had hypothyroid and the doctors in Odisha had diagnosed him to have hyperthyroid. This misdiagnosis made his condition much worse and he gained a lot of weight and became very unhealthy and on top of all that the main reason why he was constantly tired was because his mother forced him to practice hockey for long hours a day, even though he does not like hockey where as he wanted to play football. This made me feel sad for him.

Day 14

Today I had an interesting but saddening conversation with the doctors. Many people in Bengal who are not educated and think that their child has a health issue(but they don’t) come all the way from Bengal to Bangalore to get better treatment as they don’t have access to good doctors in Bengal and there are agents who take advantage of this situation and tell the people that if they give them money (a very huge sum of it which could take them to apollo 12 times for the same amount) and then they will take them to Bangalore for free, give them a small room and free treatment. but the hospital itself provides treatment and space to stay for free so indirectly they are cheating the innocent people… and after they come to Bangalore the doctors scold them and tell them that there is nothing wrong with the child.

Day 20

Today I saw a kid who was around 5 years old, who had a hole in her heart and after looking at a bunch of tests and scans in his hand, the doctor told them that it would be best for them to go for a surgery. The mom started crying and the kid was clueless and was playing with a stone on a string. The family of the child was worried for his health. When the child was told about the surgery she started to cry and said she did not want to go for the surgery. Once she was forced into the room, before the surgery she told me to tell her family that she loved them and if she died his older brother could have her blue teddy bear. That made me feel like crying.

Today was my last day and I have promised that I will be back to do the service in weekends. I felt bad that it was my last day, but I was happy since vacation was around the corner.

I saw the suffering of the people who queued up at free hospitals for treatment that they could never afford otherwise. It made me feel lucky, and I am so thankful to my parents to provide all the cushion around my life.

I am happy that I have experience something like this where I have helped people with benefits to myself too. It was an amazing experience that has provoked a lot of thoughts in my head. I am thankful to the doctors who let me work under them and overall I had fun and learned a lot.