Of injection pricks and sore behinds!

When I was a kid, we had an MBBS doctor in ONGC’s dispensary. He was a chubby Assamese guy; cheerful, and a great cricketer. However, I was morbidly afraid of him, like most kids are, of doctors. Since the dispensary was within the premises of the township we lived in, all one needed to visit the doctor were the slightest of symptoms, and a personal medical record book. For this reason, my mother often sent whosoever was sick amongst us brothers to the doctor all alone, properly rehearsed with what to say to him. Though I detested going alone to the doctor, I had often no choice, with my dad busy at office, and my mom having many other important things to do than to attend to one of her son’s running nose. As I sometimes waited in the queue to see him, my medical record book clasped tightly in my little hands, I used to pray to God that I don’t end up getting an injection prescribed. When it was finally my turn, I always crossed my finger before entering. Once inside, I used to greet the burly doctor with a ‘namaste’, and then like a parrot narrate in well-rehearsed lines my symptoms to him. But, like a man who seemed to know-it-all, he used to nearly finish writing the prescription in my book by the time I finished speaking about my illness. Sometimes, when either I was very ill, or sometimes when he was in the mood, he’d poke his stethoscope at random spots on my chest ever so briefly before handing over to me my book. So many times I tried to gather the courage to ask if the prescription included an injection, but I never really could. So it was another wait at the compounder’s window, who filled up our prescriptions, and who would finally let out the sentence, ‘There’s an injection here, to be taken once daily for five days.’ The hell would break loose on me, and if god-forbid it were the Quinine for malaria, I used to almost die out of fear for the utterly painful injection (in those days Quinine injection was the treatment for malaria, and malaria used to be diagnosed in our dispensary only by the doctor’s clinical acumen. Lab tests were rare.). More often than not, the doctor decided to mix a dose of Analgin (for fever) with Qunine, creating thus the devil’s own mixture, and I often thought if this was the infamous third-degree torture they often talked about in films. The nurse who administered the injection was no less than a daakan (witch) to me (poor thing, I hope she’s doing well wherever she is now). She chose the largest of the syringes for me with the thickest of the needles, precariously boiled for not more than a jiffy after the last victim’s injection, and poked into my behind with criminal indifference. That I shouted at the top of my voice and even cried in muffled sobs did not make any difference to her, and it was in those days when I had first started wondering if God pardoned at least one murder per person, per life. Once, after the first of such five injections, I decided to give the whole turmoil a slip by not declaring to my parents about the prescribed injection, and quietly skipped going to the dispensary the next day. To my great horror, the witch herself showed at our house, late in the evening, after she’d finished poking everyone else’s behind at the dispensary, fully armed with the injection kit and all. That evening not only did I suffer the great prick on one buttock, my dad placed a few smacks on the other as well. Malaria is now-a-days treated in much more humane ways, but I bet there won’t be another nurse anywhere who’d go to the errant boy’s homes to give them their missed pricks!