Among the various stresses a postgraduate faces in a medical career, a thesis is perhaps an important component. The student’s selection of a topic, the approval from the professor and other authorities, the collection and analysis of study materials, the final writing and submission to the university before exams, and the acceptance to receive the final degree are all stressful steps. Of course, not every student experiences the same level of stress. I have heard stories of students (the blighters) finishing their entire thesis overnight by cleverly copying from a previous source.
Leaving aside the controversies about whether a thesis is really required or not, I was not so lucky with my topic when pursuing paediatric surgery. My lady professor (now no more, God bless her) gave me a topic of thesis very close to her heart—’undescended testis.’ This condition occurs when the male child’s testis fails to descend into the scrotal pouches, leading to degenerative changes if left uncorrected. The implications of undescended testis include future issues with fertility, male hormonal production, and possible malignant transformation.
My professor started with some basic questions, and as the thesis proceeded, she kept adding new elements to the study. The study took all of my two years to complete, unlike some of the luckier colleagues around me. She initially demanded that I study a hundred cases, subsequently increasing the number to one thousand, and ultimately settling on five hundred. I was able to manage approximately two hundred cases in the final data set. I can proudly say that not one of the patients included in the study belonged to the realm of fiction.
One day, she made the decision to review cases that had undergone operations since the establishment of the hospital’s paediatric surgery department. I was sifting through the hospital records, tracking down the elderly patients who had undergone surgery, and composing postcards inviting them to return for a follow-up appointment. I tracked them down and conducted various tests on them after successfully begging or bamboozling some labs to perform these tests for free. In this process, I remember purchasing and writing a few hundred postcards.
Quite a few arrived, promptly directed to me, with a wealth of stories to share. Some were fertile and healthy; some were infertile. One, with bilateral undescended testis, was in fact super fertile with many kids, and at the age of fifty, he complained that he was sexually very active with multiple partners! He seriously questioned whether he could have undergone a testis transplantation as an evil medical experiment during his childhood at this hospital. He confessed, pointing to his head, that this was simply not him and that the cause of his behaviour appeared to come from below rather than from above. I assured him that such a testicular transplantation is still a long way to go.
Luckily for myself and unluckily for my wife, I got married in the second year of my residency, when my thesis was becoming more complex. Apart from the basic thing about paediatric surgery—that its practitioners do not make money—she is aware of very few things in paediatric surgery, and undescended testis is certainly one of them. I declined the dowry (ahem!), much to the delight of my wife’s family, who believed they had struck gold. If only they knew what was in store for their daughter once she got married. The poor lady was diligently working late into the night on large thick paper sheets, entering the data. The world of computers and Excel sheets existed, but they were still beyond our consciousness and reach. Instead of rollicking in the streets of Mumbai, as recently married couples should ideally do during their microseconds of free time available during residency, we were deeply focused on the data sheet of the study patients. We were not whispering sweet nothings, but loudly discussing the harsh everythings of the thesis.
One day, my dear professor barged into the wards and asked me whether we had data on the normal sizes of testes in the Indian population. I replied in the negative. Only in the Western world did the data compilation occur. She added one more component to the study. “We need Indian data for the normal sizes of testis in different age groups. We should scientifically see if Indians have significant differences from the Western world with regards to the testicular size.” My heart sank in horror at this new idea from my professor. Another time, she suggested that I visit schools, not only to screen the children for undescended testicles, but also to measure their testicular sizes and create Indian charts. Luckily, this proposal fell off soon, as some of the school principals I approached did not permit such an honourable endeavour. It probably felt like a bizarre idea to them.
Now, I possessed an instrument known as an orchidometer, essentially consisting of wooden oval-shaped balls of various sizes, secured by a robust, unbreakable string. Imagine a string of pearls. Instead of pearls, we have wooden balls of varying sizes. To measure the size of the testes and assess their growth, we use the orchidometer by placing the wooden pieces next to the testis. The project took a drastic turn. As instructed by my professor, I had to visit all the hospital wards, identify the normal boys (normal in the sense that they had descended testis), and after securing hard-won consent from disbelieving parents, measure the testis size, record it, and analyse it to create Indian charts for normal sizes at different age groups. This was perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of my hospital stay. As the one single Self permeates humans, animals, and nature, Advaita teaches me to love all. But I am sorry, Sri Adi Shankaracharya. I hate only one person and one object in the world, and that is Mr. Prader and the orchidometer in his name. The memories and the nightmares refuse to go away.
I forgive my seniors and colleagues for every bit of torture they inflicted on me in the wards, but one thing for which I can never forgive or forget is the moniker they attached to me as a ‘Goti-Baba’. That name still rankles, and there were innumerable jokes reverberating in the hospital wards and outside the hospital too about this Baba. Gabbar Singh (of Sholay film fame) was the previous figure whose name evoked fear in children in distant villages who were unable to sleep and served as a means to force them to do so. Goti Baba replaced Gabbar Singh. Some of the darkest days I spent in the hospital were when I went around like a zombie in the early hours or late nights with the dreaded orchidometer measuring the sizes of testis in the ward patients. All right, I will get this off my chest and name-shame my seniors and colleagues: Ramesh, Anand, Ashok, Girish, and Ganesh. The last was my %$$#@ intern, and I strongly suspect he had invented this name for me.
Anyway, I successfully passed my exams, destroyed my orchidometer at the earliest possible opportunity, and make a continuous effort to forget about the days spent writing my thesis. Small compensation, though. Undescended testis cases do manage to put breakfast on my table all these years, as it forms an important component of my practice. My wife recognises this condition immediately, even after so many years, but the memories do haunt us.
RANDOM MUSINGS 