A Good Pair of Hands

He greeted me as he always did, hands folded weakly together in the gesture of respect that is ubiquitous in India. Namaste: “I bow to the Divine in you.” He could barely lift his head from the thin pillow, and his emaciated arms trembled uncontrollably from the effort of opposing his palms as I approached bed 6, row 2, in a second-floor ward of the Government General Hospital in Madras. Embarrassment heated my face at the reverence that lit up his tired eyes and rekindled, for the tiniest moment, the fading sparks of what had once been the natural élan of a 12-year-old boy. To him, I was God—weren't all doctors? His faith humbled me at the same time that it angered me. Did he not know, could he not see that I—a newly graduated physician, still unsure of my right to be called “Doctor”—could not cure him? The typhoid bacillus that scavenged his small intestine and poisoned his blood also eluded the antibiotics pouring into his veins. I am not God, I screamed silently, even as I sat by his bed and gently disengaged his clasped hands, careful not to grimace at the putrid stench from his abdominal abscess, smell of my failure. The skin of his palms reminded me of a dried-up riverbed, with arid furrows crisscrossing from the wrist to the joints of his fingers. Calluses like rough pebbles dotted the outer edges of his hands. His fingers quivered in my grasp. Tiny red beads crowned some of the fingertips where drops of blood had been pricked out by his caregivers, to reappear as complete blood counts on the pages of his hospital chart.