An Ugly Sunday

So this Sunday was not nearly as uplifting as last Sunday...

I woke up late with only 15 minutes to catch my normal bus to the Kalighat clinic so I decided to stay behind and just catch another. I asked the next bus to come along if it was going my direction and he said yes... so I got on. Turns out, I ended up way out in a slum on the outskirts of Kolkata... and just in case you were wondering, slums in Kolkata are not the friendliest of places to end up.

After many rocky, broken-English conversations with the locals, FOUR bus rides, and spending 15 extra rupees on bus fares I finally made it to work... an hour and a half late. As if that wasn't a bad enough way to start the day, things just continued to slid downhill from there...

When I arrived I was just in time to grab a stretcher and help my Irish friend Ciara carry in a new patient. Earlier that morning, Meredith had found the man on a platform at a train station. He was off in a dark corner and had obviously been put there and left for dead by someone (probably the police). When she found him he was very weak, having trouble breathing, and laying in a pool of his own blood.

While in the taxi, en route to Kalighat, the man stopped breathing and died. As I learned that day, the practice here is to clean the body in a way that honors the deceased person and then dispose of their body in a respectable humane fashion. I had to bring him into the showers and remove his clothes to wash his body.

What I saw next was easily the most horrible wound I've ever seen in my entire life! He had two very large bloody wounds, one on each ankle. Each one was teeming with more maggots than I'd of ever thought possible! From a distance it was like a swarm of movement on each leg... And the smell... oh my God! By writing this, I'm not trying to gross you out, I just want you to know how bad it really was. I very nearly lost my composure. In fact, I'm not sure how i didn't. If I'd of had time to eat breakfast that morning I would've lost it for sure.

As we rinsed off his body I just kept trying to pull myself together and the thought kept crossing my mind, "I have absolutely no training to handle stuff like this." I really had no idea what I was doing AND there was no one that spoke English there to help me figure the whole mess out! I think it's safe to say doctors and paramedics in the U.S. never see shit like this! Maybe homicide investigators do... but rarely.

With my right thumb, I reached down and closed his eyes. After cleaning his body we wrapped him neatly in beautiful white linen and placed him in the morg room to be cremated later. On the way into the morg there's a sign that reads, "I'm on my way to Heaven" and as you're leaving there's one that reads, "Thanks for helping me get there."

That night when I laid down to go to sleep I couldn't get that man's face or mangled body out of my mind. Meredith couldn't either... We were both filled with anger and disgust at the apparent indifference and numbness of the locals towards the plight of a suffering and dying fellowman. This is something that I grew to understand a bit better as I learned more about India and how things are here.

We thought about how scared and painful that man's last few weeks must have been. What it would feel like to be laying there horribly wounded and dying and to have people only walking around you and staring, but nobody stopping to help you!

How screwed up is it that no one stopped to help this man sooner? He must have had those wounds for several days. Poor guy...

Ever sense yesterday afternoon I've had a low-grade fever and just generally feel like crap. Your prayers and the sending of healing energy would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Love Jeremiah