The Volunteers

 

ENT and ophthalmology both are subjects dealing with very small yet very essential parts of the human body. Contrary to expectations however the instruments they use for examining and operating on these organs are huge. The students must develop the skill of using these instruments and demonstrate the same during practical examinations.

While the main exposure to these instruments and their uses comes from the clinical postings, we also have practical classes of these subjects wherein we get to learn about and practice with these instruments further. The main aim of these classes is to help us become more conversant with the instruments and cases that we must face during the final exam. However, they also have an occult aim of bridging the gap in learning of those students who are too lazy to wake up in the morning to go for clinical postings.

In these practical classes patients are generally brought from the wards so that the students can practice history taking and examination on them. While the patients mostly give us long and mostly irrelevant histories about their entire life on simply asking: “What brought you in?” during the clinical examinations they are not that generous. Only a few people get to do the examination before the patient makes up an excuse to run away from the forty pairs of excited yet novice hands waiting to examine them.

It is during such crisis hours that out respected and beloved volunteers come in to save the day. They offer us their eyes, nose, ears and mouth to examine. And most of us show our appreciation by making them gag, sneeze or wince in pain in return. They sit, though not very patiently, as almost 20 batchmates use them as dummies to sharpen their clinical skills, till finally they get to avenge this cruelty by trying out the same procedures on another poor spectator-turned-volunteer.

There are some procedures which the patients don’t let anyone perform on them ( not even the PGTs or Professors), mostly because they cause a lot of pain and discomfort to the patient. They simply refuse and walk away giving us dirty looks. Then volunteers become our heroes and we get to practice on them not even bothering to wash the instrument of change the gauze in use while switching from one volunteer to another! These procedures are mostly not done in routine clinical practice, because now we have better and more sophisticated tools for these procedures now.

However, this refusal and somewhat hostility on the part of the patients leads one to wonder about the changing relationship between doctors and patients. These techniques were invented years ago before the advent of digital and x ray imaging. Back then, these were the only techniques of examination and the patients trusted the doctors and medical students enough to allow them to perform such procedures on them, no matter how much discomfort they brought. Where is that relation of trust gone now?

While the doctor patient relations have changed, we still have that trust from our beloved volunteers who know that we will not make them swallow a roll of gauze accidentally, and we can also count on them, as we know that they won’t mind even if we pull their ears to hard or poke their eyes with our fingers while checking for intraocular pressure.