Serendipity & Zemblanity.
Published by Vijay September 13th, 2007 in Life in India, Medicine, Nebulous ViewsWarning: This is a rare personal post and is also a (rarer) medical post.
This started off as the long version of my response to a question that JMB had asked while commenting on this post, where I had wondered if there is a word which is the antonym of serendipity. Cathy was good enough to dredge up the ugly word ‘zemblanity.’
In the intervening weeks one more common medical myth has been confirmed. This is the one about ‘bad things occurring in threes.’
After the 17-year-old boy with a Thalamic glioma, I have unfortunately seen two more 16-to-17-year-old boys with bad malignant tumors. One a huge tumour in the kidney and the other a tumor in the stomach with liver metastases. The renal tumour, though huge, seems operable and hence potentially curable. There is no hope for the kid with the liver mets though. There is hardly any normal liver left. He has only a few weeks to months of life left.
My short answer to JMB still remains true. I’m thankful that I’m not the one who has to break the bad news to the families. But it doesn’t make me any happier to know that the bad news originated from me.
On average I see three or four new cancers a week. If I count the large strokes and severe pneumonias in elderly people, I guess I am the conveyor of bad news on a daily basis. Not a good thing to be. Believe me.
Getting back to the issue of zemblanity, here is a personal story which fits to a ‘z.’ This is a fairly long story, so I’m goint to break it into a few parts.
P (my wife) passed her final board exam to qualify for the National Board Diploma in Family Medicine in June 2006. It was announced in the beginning of this year that the convocation would be held in Chennai in March on a Sunday. It was to be a grand function with the Health Minister of the Indian Government as the Guest of Honour.
P wanted her parents to be present at the event. There were clear instructions from the Board that each graduate could only be accompanied by two adults. That left me and Aathi (our daughter) out.
P’s parents are a retired couple who live in Trichy. Her father is an engineer who used to work for the Tamil Nadu Government (in SIDCO). Her mother is a teacher who retired as the professor and head of the department of zoology in a famous women’s college in Trichy. Her younger brother is an engineer and he is employed in a big IT firm in Chennai.
So we decided to get three mangoes with one stone (a variation of a Tamil saying, which essentially means to kill two birds with one stone).
Attending the convocation and visiting my brother-in-law were two.
The third is the medical part of the story, which will be continued tomorrow (if I don’t get swamped at work, touch wood).
The story continues at…
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10 Responses to “Serendipity & Zemblanity.”
- 1 Pingback on Sep 15th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
- 2 Pingback on Sep 16th, 2007 at 2:37 am
- 3 Pingback on Sep 26th, 2007 at 8:21 am
Vijay! you left us hanging!!! Hmmm … you’re just trying for repeat business … ;o)
Can’t wait to see the rest of this …
Congrats to your wife Vijay! Looking forward to the next post.
Oh this is a good news/bad news post.
Zemblanity: I think you have illustrated this very well, unfortunately. How sad for those three young men, although one may be fine in the long run. My dear old MIL had a kidney removed because of cancerous tumour when she was 75. She lived until she was 104! Sadly she died of colon cancer but she did have another 29 years after her renal tumour.
Congratulations to Priya. I wasn’t sure that she was a doctor, although somehow I thought so, from something you had said in a post. She comes from very clever stock. Do you think Aathi has inherited the medical genes?
You’d better be back tomorrow with the conclusion! On penalty of something, yet unknown.
Do you know that zemblanity is being underlined? So I guess it’s not in the Wordpress dictionary.
regards
jmb
Vijay, thoughts and prayers to those with the tumors and their families. During times like these, focus on the good news you bring….It may help lessen the pain.
Congrats to Priya on passing the boards. I’ll bet her parents are honored to attend the convocation by her side.
I’ll be checking back for more. :-D)
As you said rightly you feel sad to diagnose a fatal disease without any treatment. Especially so when they are young and when they do not have long to live. Luckily in adult medical practice, i only see an occasional young patient with malignancy. Most of them are older. Since you are sent most of the patients with suspected / unsuspected malignancy for imaging, you get to see quiet a lot. As you said rightly, it is even more difficult to break it to the patient and his/her relations. They go through the classic train of emotions from denial to anger to guilt to depression. You see different people taking it in different ways. Elderly people mostly take it stoically while their relations really feel very bad. The more accepting the patient is the more worse the atendee as well as i feel. Young people told to have malignancy go in for a shocked state. Once you announce a news like this, sadness and grief lingers in you throughout the day. You try to think out if anything else treatble could cause a smiliar picture, like some rare infection, etc. But in the end fate wins over everybody. It makes you also think how mortal we are and out of the blue we could be diagnosed of something like this. i guess we have to take everyday as it comes and enjoy it to the most so that we do not regret that we should have spent it better.
Are you forgetting the fourth mango? Pout !
Vijay, it is terrible about those young teenagers having such terrible cancers. It makes me feel bad for the times I complain about having to visit my oncologist or that I get angry over tests he wants me to have done. I only have CLL and I receive no treatment as of yet, and I am 55 years old. I cannot imagine having a child or grandchild being diagnosed with cancer. my heart goes out to their families.
Also, I think many of us don’t consider how the Doctor’s behind the scene (you) are being effected by what they see and know about patients. Im sure they are waiting and Praying for good news, and then you see things that you know will break their hearts.
I did not know Priya was a Doctor. I bet she is a really good one. Does she have her own blog?
Now I have to go up one post and read part II……