Pankaj Desai's Blogs

  We will call him Pravin. Pravin’s father was a farmer. They owned a piece of land in the village, a cow and two buffaloes. His parents’ lives taught him all good values and soft skills. He got his primary schooling in his village. His brilliance was obvious right from his early school days. His father encouraged him to study further. But that was going to be a challenge. The middle and high school was in the town about 5 km away and there was a river between the two villages. Getting admission to that school was not difficult. But commuting in monsoon was going to be a problem. In other months there was a very shallow strip. It was used for walking through the river. But in the monsoon season when the river would be flowing bank to bank, it would mean swimming through. Walking through, Swimming through and sometimes running through      So much was his enthusiasm to study further that walking through, swimming through and sometimes running through didn’t bother h...

  Becoming More Scientific, More Rational and More Accurate In Preeclampsia   Abstract Currently the etiopathological changes in preeclampsia are believed to begin at the fetomaternal interface and so the placenta is labeled as the main cause of these conditions. A group from George's University of London and some from other parts of the world have proposed that in mothers with an already compromised cardiovascular function, before the commencement of pregnancy, pregnancy adds to a heavy load resulting in a series of adverse manifestations. In one study, it was found that on an average in a pregnant mother the left ventricular mass increased by 52% in about 9 months. When this was compared with the increase in the left ventricular mass of athletes, it was found that they register an increase of only 25% over a long period of 24 months. This means that the mother gets a much lesser time to bring about the necessary cardiac changes than even the robustly training athletes....

“Sir there is a rupture uterus. She is looking very pale. We are arranging for blood. The anesthetists have been called” – it was a typical call from one of the junior doctor on duty from the  labor  room in the middle of the night. Such calls instantly awaken and put the consultant-on-duty in alert mode.  As I accelerated my car on the nearly deserted roads in the middle of the night, I did a mental rehearsal of what all complications and challenges I was likely to face and what all should be done. No wonder rupture uterus is called “electric emergency in obstetrics”. It is a potentially catastrophic event during childbirth by which the integrity of the uterus is breached. It is a life-threatening event for mother and baby. Rupture uterus: Baby dead, mother endangered As I was racing up the stairs to the  labor  room operation theater, I passed a junior doctor. He was obviously breathless hurrying back from the blood-bank carrying two un...

Medical college hospitals have some very interesting routines. One of them is The Grand Round . Though its structure and name may vary from one hospital to another, in the obgyn department where I worked it was on the day on which we had our minor OT. On this day surgeries which did not need major anesthesia were performed. The chief of the unit would take the round with all other junior consultants and all postgraduate students. It was a spectacle – the chief walking cot by cot surrounded by his entourage of his subordinates and nursing staff. One fine morning in one such grand round, the chief stopped by a patient who had choriocarcinoma (a quick-growing form of cancer that occurs in a woman's uterus (womb). The abnormal cells start in the tissue that would normally become the placenta). Choriocarcinoma occurs in young subjects in their reproductive age. Thankfully it is very responsive to treatment. The subject in question was being administered chemotherapy (medic...