15th of December

We arrived at the hospital and after waiting for 40 minutes or so in the principle’s secretary’s office we were finally ushered into the inner sanctum (actually down the hall). Dr Kashyap then admitted receiving one fax and one postal letter from us, despite his previous insistence that no communication from Australia was ever received. We then spent about 20 minutes going over what we wanted to do, when, for how long and why. It should be noted that each question was answered very quickly, it was the continuous repetition of the questions and the same answers that actually occupied the 20 minutes.


We were told that the head of aneas was not available and we should go across to the cardiothoracic vascular theatres for the mean time. Arriving at the theatres we had to put on scrubs that looked like they predated the monolithic period, so washed and stained were they. They were also sized to fit someone from the said period with an ideal stature of 140 cm, which meant they ended mid calf on me. Now I want you to consider that if you were to walk in to an operating theatre what kind of foot wear you’d like to put on; covered and water impermeable would be high on the list of answers. Wrong, the correct answer in India is rubber sandals, no toe coverage and certainly not very effective at preventing blood from coming in contact with an enclosed foot. However, that said entering the theatre was very comforting in many ways. There was advanced monitoring, everything you’d expect in a first word theatre. Certainly the ventilator wasn’t quite as advanced as what we have at RPA but it was close. It just didn’t support the advanced ventilation modes we have back at home.

After watching the start of the operation we bailed with excuses of a need to do shopping, which wasn’t that far from the truth. Before we left we were invited to see a surgery tomorrow, being Saturday we were a bit surprised but we were assured theatres in India ran on Saturday.