Living in fear of dying

It was my first on-call duty. With jittery hands, I put on gloves and feigned a confident look.

The patients I was assigned mostly suffered from hepatitis B or C. After watching closely how my fellow interns worked, I set out to begin my task. I approached my first patient, and picked up the file that read ‘Hepatitis C +ve’ in bold on top. One look at him and fear gripped me. Lying there unconscious, was a man whose hands and feet were tied with a rope to the bed. After every few minutes, he would struggle violently, and utter a sting of profane words. This is how a patient with end-stage liver disease behaves, when he suffers mental impairment along with liver damage, medically known as hepatic encephalopathy.

Read more....