Field Study

Wednesday/Thursday I began my field study. We drove in a car caravan of doctors to the outposts located at different slums in Kolkata. First we visited some of the slum homes. 24 people lived in quarters the size of my living room. They all shared the same squat toilet, siphoned the same water from the rusty pipe sticking out of the concrete floor (but the water only came on 3 times a day) and cooked their meals on that very same floor. 

 Almost all of the patients we visited either were recovering from or previously had cholera. I felt such a strong connection to the women and children we visited. Many with skin lesions and cross eyes would peek around their scarves to look at me like curious woodland creatures. When I brought out my camera, they all ran away, but when I surrendered the clicker hands up, they came creeping back, babies first. I took a picture of the house and showed it to them. And then a few more. Soon all the women and children were back wanting me to take a picture of them and then show them on the LCD screen. The trick was to take a second picture 2 seconds after the first, when they started laughing from the novelty.

 After when I asked them (with the help of a translator) about their medical history and treatment, they gladly offered their answers. The cholera vaccine is in phase 3 of its development. A phase that requires the testing on thousands of patients. The clinics set the double blind study up giving every patient that came in the vaccine (half were placebos) regardless of ailment, treated whatever they came in for, and then followed their progress over 3 years. The patients they see have every kind of ailment under the sun: Cholera, Dengue, Malaria, Tuberculosis and Leprosy are just a few. India is one of the few countries in the world that still has Polio. MDR (multiple disease resistance) is a huge and deadly problem because the pharmacists give many antibiotics without prescription and then people feel better and stop taking the medicine. Many of the patients don’t understand why they have to give blood or take the vaccine. The doctors bribe them by giving out gifts to every patient. To get the neighborhoods to trust them, they paid for the repaving of many of the slum roads. They still have problems with Muslim women not wanting to be touched by any doctor (male or female) and the doctors unfortunately have given up on many of these women saying “we have enough patients, if they don’t come in then that’s their problem.” The outpost clinics consist of an old computer, a few cases of vials of medicine, a crumbling examination table with makeshift curtain (some have no curtain) and way too many people. I sat with a beautiful doctor in his mid twenties who was doing a separate project, taking blood samples from dengue patients to try and find a vaccine, and talked with him. Actually, it was more like me asking a million questions a second and him graciously answering. I watched him take blood from a woman and process the blood with only thin plastic cafeteria gloves. Her baby was given to a male staffer and looked petrified. I wanted to hold that baby. I wanted to do anything. The time we spend out on the field is only a few hours a day—everyone is afraid I will catch a disease if I stay any longer. It’s so frustrating. When I’m in the clinic all of the troubles of India just vanish. This is worth it. I could do this every day all day for the rest of my life. So what if I get sick? I’m an American they can fix me. Let me stay here, watch more, work here. Maybe that’s a boldness from my undeveloped frontal cortex. And in reality it’s probably selfish of me to want to stay, when I can’t really help, and if I did get sick those doctors could get in big trouble and maybe lose their funding. But regardless the outposts make sense to me. One of the few things in India that does.