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CRANK'S CORNER

        Just pick any two doctors at random. Now try to get them agree on the diagnosis and treatment of an ailment, the chances for that to happen are as high as Sonia Gandhi winning World Miss Beautiful Smile contest or Parliament having a day of no adjournments. Perhaps that is part of the Hippocratic oath that talks of keeping the patients guessing always. But when it comes to referring patients to repeated clinical tests and lab analysis, Sonia Gandhi indeed wins the Miss Beautiful Smile Contest, er rather, doctors certainly agree more than whole-heartedly. This is also perhaps a part of the Hippocratic oath by which doctors large-heartedly take a vow to keep lab owners and technicians in good business.

        Doctors, by recommending clinical tests, may be only trying to figure out the possibility of any untoward eventuality due to your physical condition. But lab tests are clearly an offshoot of Chinese torture, that many times over you come to the idea of rather enduring your physical ailment instead of pouring yet another cauldron of blood for the umpteen heaven knows what tests. The labs take so much blood from you as if draculas and vampires were fully paid up members there and hence have to be constantly fed. Last week alone, blood was sucked out of my thin veins at least five times all within a space of three hours. And at the end of it all, the medical reports made it clear that I am anaemic. What else could I have been after sacrificing so much blood that, in my reckoning, would have been more than enough to run a full-fledged Lion's Blood Camp! The labs are also very finicky about the kind of blood they want. They don't just prick a vein and let the blood dribble out. As befitting a true torture test, they will take blood after your first yawn. Then after your first wink. And then, after your first swear word uttered against the tests. It goes on till you are left with no energy to do any bodily function. It is at this extremely weak moment, they produce the bill for your tests and you can't even cry out your protest.

        But the beauty of lab tests is such that each one of them so uniquely repulsive and irritating that you will be confused as to which deserves to be called the most reprehensive. Take the case of scanning, especially of the abdomen area.

        Almost all the doctors want your abdomen to be scanned, even if you have gone to them for just a running nose. It is a kind of kink in the profession. Some doctors even send for scanning the postman who drops in to drop the letters.

        Anyway scanning is an extremely technical and sensitive procedure that cannot be conducted on you unless otherwise your bladder is filled with the quantity of water that roughly equals the annual rainfall of Chiranpunjee. You will be allowed to lie on the scanning table only after your bladder is about to create an impromptu tsunami in the vicinity. Even then the doctor wouldn't start running the machine on you. A sticky, gooey stuff — looking suspiciously like coagulated spit — is applied on the area that is to be scanned. Pray why? You will wonder now. But you will not when you are sprawled on the scanning table with your mind capable of focussing only on how to ease off the humungous Sintex container that is now doing desperate duty as your bladder. In that extreme moment of embarrassing emergency, the doctor will ask you to writhe around on the table like a boa constrictor in labour pain. You see, human kidneys are located in the extremes of the hip, which if you are a normal human being (meaning that you gobble up all that is tasty) is usually the size of circus ring. So to reach for the kidneys the doctor tells you to turn around in discomforting contortions. But to roll around on an uncomfortable table in a dark room with the body smeared with sticky stuff, a doctor running a strange object near the nether parts and a dam waiting to explode below waist is something that you fervently wish happens to your sworn enemy or to those who direct the mega-serials. But you will endure all kinds of mortification and perform all circus stunts that the doctor orders to you, and I strongly suspect scanning of abdomen leads to non-performance of brain for at least a few hours.

        Scanning of the heart (echocardiograph) is fun in comparison. For, it involves tickling around chest and armpits. Of course, they don't forget to spread the guck all around your torso. It is a miracle of modern medical science that they actually manage to tear off the ECG plugs and other metals after all the glue that they pour on you.

        Anyway, by the time all the tests are over, a normal human being emerges out gaining at least 25 kilos in weight, thanks fully to the foresight of lab technicians who daub you with itchy grease that seems to be the annual output of the Fevicol company.

        This being a family paper, and those reading this column being sensitive, I am not getting into urine and stool tests, which doubtless were devised by crack Nazi radicals.

        For all your troubles, at the end of it all you will be given a huge file with more papers than the CBI filed in the Bofors case and scanned images which for normal eyes look like pictures taken on a camera without opening its lens lid. You in your desperation will try to at least make sense of what is written there. But you won't understand a single word of it. Medical reports are usually written in absent-minded cryptology.

        So you will run to your doctor lugging all the reports. And then, in the clinic you wait for eternity for him to show up. But this is also evidently part of the test, and can be aptly called: Test of patience.