Tides change

We had a very fun filled and happy fortnight in early August with the festivities and as if by some voodoo, things took a nosedive.

My jaw locked up and started making clicking noises. It hurt when I opened my mouth for anything more than a straw and yawning sent electric shocks into my brain. After going back and forth between the doctors who diagnosed the symptoms as TMJ (and they were not wrong), going through jaw movement exercises, taking lots of Ibuprofens vs.  going to a local dentist who did not do due diligence because my dental insurance was maxed out (he did not even take a new x-ray and told me the same thing the doctors told me!) things were going from bad to worse. 

In the last two weeks I ate such wonderful things as Tomato rasam sadam with Vendaikaai curry smoothie, Poondu rasam with beans paruppusili smoothie, etc. (Rice with tomato soup + okra curry blended into a smoothie..). Was mushing up everything! The taste is okay, but the texture of some of these smoothies, if you could call it that made me lose my appetite. 

My two attempts at shaving also end up in aborted missions and I started to look like this..

The little one agreed to that pose as a "pity pose". She hated that beard! 

Finally we decided enough was enough.. well truth be told Sangeetha decided enough was enough of my moping around and found a dentist through a friend who had a reputation for fixing the problem and not worrying about the insurance! So went there Friday. At first they took an x-ray and called me back to say "you sure there is no pain in this area?" and my response was "pain? what pain? I have been in so much pain that my threshold has moved!" 

So they called me back for more x-rays which confirmed that there was a big area of pus in the place where my wisdom tooth used to exist. They "extracted" the pus and said "you don't need ibuprofen, what you need is antibiotics to fight this infection!" and they were right! In two days the pain was almost gone. The clicking came to a minimum and I could eat solid food again!

Today I made a long and slow attempt and shaved. The whole family rejoiced. Never knew that a little stubble could cause so much sadness in a house. 

Krishna ummachi teased me with all the crunchy stuff at the worst possible time but Pilliyaar ummachi was not going to disappoint. There were no Kozhukattais in the house today but San did make some yummy vadai and paayasam! Was able to eat that just fine.. 

Wanted to take a picture with the kids after eating the vadais! Was reminded that we took a picture just after this moment many years ago and dug it out!

and now..

I can still carry the little one for a little while! 

The only downside is that the molar will be removed tomorrow. I plan to hang it on a necklace as a reminder of the last 17 days of stuggling. 

The jaw seems to be one of those things that literally falls in "no mans land". Doctors send you to dentists and vice versa.. it is in the perfect "punt zone". I also learned the hard way that dental insurance works differently from medical insurance. With medical insurance you hit an out of pocket maximum (2000$ or 4000$ for example) and after that you don't pay anything for that year on anything that is covered. The insurance pays. 

With dental insurance, THEY have an out of pocket maximum. Once the dental insurance has paid their part to a total of 1000 or 1500 $ a year, they stop paying for anything more complicated. So god forbid you end up with two root canals in one year, you pay out of pocket for everything else!

I don't know why we cannot have our regualar insurance cover dental procedures also. Last I knew, the gums, teeth, jaw etc. are all part of the body!

It was not like I was asking them to cure me of baldness! 

The little one did think I looked "cute" even with the beard if , IF the sunglasses went with it! Something to contemplate as a "look" when the hairline goes beyond the horizon on the head..

They say all is well that ends well. Sure hope that this saga comes to an end once the tooth is gone!

The only thing worse than PMS, is AMS

After a recent enquiry by Jr. and the Little one along the lines of "Are you okay daddy? Are you still bleeding?" and the snide comments from the wife and MIL about how women have periods a days a month while daddy has periods almost every day!

Of course, they were alluding to the nose bleeds and the one thing that has gotten it this far is the AMS, my abbreviation for the American Medical System.

At the risk of boring the gentle junta that scrolls past this space, this has to be explained!

A typical conversation with the appointment nurse is:

Me: (nasal voice, coughing) I need to see a doctor. I have blah, blah, BlaH and blAH! I think I am dying!

Hospital person: Do you want to see your "Primary physician?"

Me : Yes. That would be fine!

HP : Who is your primary physician?

Me : I dont know. I have probably met him or her once. I usually go to Urgent care. (this is true because, I get to go to a hospital only after 5 or on weekends and the regular doctors work 9-5!)

HP : Let me look up your primary care physician. Ah, there it is.. it is Dr. Azer-Chen-maniam!

Me : Oh! Can I see him today?

HP : I am sorry. The earliest appointment I have for him is on July 32nd!

Me : But it is June 20th today and July 32nd is like ....

HP : yeah! He is very busy and is very heavily booked!

Me : Are you telling me that people actually know when they are going to fall sick in advance and booked appointments in the future?

HP : (has probably been trained to answer this in front of a mirror without flinching a hundred times, as part of qualifying for the job). Sir, people usually schedule advance appointments with primary physicians for regular checkups, post checkup after they have gone to urgent care, etc.

Me : Is there any other doc. in the facility I can see today?

HP : Let me check.. Can I put you on hold?

Me : (about to open mouth and realizing that HP was asking a rhetorical question.. I was already listening to music that would put any elevator to shame!)

HP : Thanks for holding. Actually we have doctor David-Rama-Park with an opening at 10:00 AM day after tomorrow. Will that work?

Me : I dont think I can wait that long! (by now reminded of great grandmother and her saying things like "saavukku vaadanna paththukku varan" which literally means, we invite him for a funeral and he shows up for the 10th day ceremony)

HP : In that case I suggest you go to Urgent care again.

Me : Is there ANYWAY I can see a doctor, with an appointment, as soon as I am sick?

HP : Yes. There IS a way. You see, we have some appointments reserved every day with rotating doctors in the out patient department called "same day appointments". They are not movable to other times and are first come first served. So if you call in at 8:30-9:00 AM, you might get a same day appointment..

Me : thanks for letting me know that!

HP : Anytime. I hope you feel better!

Except for the last four lines, this has been the typical conversation for the last few years! Only this time I burst out and found out about the "same day" stuff. Not great, but still better than nothing.

Now, why is this dude complaining like this about the system? Why can't he learn to deal with it? you may ask!

The answer lies in a small name board on a single story building, that used to be on St. Mary's Road in R.A. Puram, Chennai, which simply read:

Dr. S. Jagadeesan
M.B.B.S

Just five houses away from ours, Dr. known in our family fondly as "Jaga", was a towering personality (probably because he seemed huge and most of my memories of him are from when I was a kid!). With his big face and even bigger cooling glass / spectacles and his booming voice he would make me cower either out of respect, fear or both.

He was in true sense our "family" doctor. Grandpa, grandma, parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, a total of 20+ people in our house alone, were all Dr. Jaga's patients. He knew everyone, their history(not just medical, but real history), hereditary problems within the family tree, family gossip, etc. etc. He was pretty much the only doc. we visited unless he recommended us to see some specialist guys like ENT's, Dentists etc.

He would take one look at me and go "Enna Sundararama? patta padaikkara veiyalla vilayadittu gold spot kudichchiya?" (did you play in the hot sun and drink a cold drink right away?) and I would be thinking "How the hell does he know that?" and he would read my mind and say "I just saw you yesterday drinking gold spot in the store across the street, as I walked out of the clinic and thought I would be seeing you here soon!".

I have so many memories of how he "cured" me of things, be it Jaundice, Madras-eye, chicken pox, etc. etc.. Let us just say it is a long list!

After I came to the USA, my parents called me one week out of the blue and told me "Jaga" passed away. I cried for two days just thinking about him every now and then. Just before my first flight to the US (which was also my first flight!), he spoke to me for half an hour and told me to carry a bunch of medicines with me, just in case. Then he gave me an MMR vaccine almost last minute, because people in the US are picky and insist on it. He said "unakku than ella vyadhiyum at least oru daravai vanduduththe.. you have built up good immunity by now!" (you have got all the major ailments at least once..) and continued "So I never gave you an MMR. Also it is not normal here, but I think they require it there. You will have a mild fever and feel sore for a day. Better here than just after you reach US!" So thoughtful....

It is possible that I keep complaining about the system here, because I miss Dr. Jaga! I was pampered by a doctor who knew how to fix me in a few minutes or within a few hours with the right threat, advice,and or medicine. The fact that he knew me was definitely as much a factor there as how much he knew his medicine!

That perhaps was the magic "Jaga" touch!

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A doctor a day keeps the ....

Finally met a doctor who actually saw my condition for what it was! He did a thorough inspection and said "Yes. Your sinus is infected and you need antibiotics!"

I thought to myself "there we go again.. possibly going to give me the same old amoxycilling and shoo me away"

He did prescribe a stronger dose of Amoxycillin than the usual 500mg but surprised me by saying "you have been regularly sick this year according to your medical records! That is highly unusual"

My jaw dropped. He actually READ my medical records! A Doctor. In the US of A! He read "my" medical records!

Then he went on to order a CT scan!

By now I am already thinking, I have died and passed on to out-patient heaven and have visions of Chitraguptan counting the number of swear words on my blog before deciding my fate.

This doctor, was also nice enough to call me within a few hours after the scan and give me a thorough analysis of my situation. Why I am falling sick so often? why the standard Amoxycillin will not help? and What else is required from me as a personal committment to make sure I do not fall sick again? etc. etc.

Unlike the other stet. wearing dudes and dudettes, this guy did not tell me to embrace yoga, eat healthy, have less stress, etc. etc..Everytime I hear that lecture, feel like hitting the doc. with some blunt instrument.

If you work to make ends meet, share responsibilities in raising kids, fill up your minivan at the local costco once a week, and are a south Indian dude with strong tastebuds and a penchant for deep fried stuff, it is not possible to do yoga, eat healthy and have less stress!

Finally this doctor said something that cracked me up.

"I am going to prescribe a medication for you. This will definitely help your condition immediately. But it is a steroid and you need to take it early in the morning after breakfast. The reason I am cautioning you is that it might make you a little hyper!"

How can I get any more hyper-er?

My faith in the American medical system is a tad restored. I stand corrected after all these years. There are some real doctors here! No, you are not stealing him from me.. I am keeping this dude a secret! He is now my "primary" physician! he he he..

Now he is indirectly forcing me to:

1. get up early in the morning
2. eat breakfast

who knows, maybe he is just giving me "balli mittai" and this is a ploy to get me to sleep early, wake up early and eat breakfast?!

In any case, the pills start now!

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The potpourri that is life

Last wednesday saw a turning point in Daddy's life. He had written posts the previous weekend on how he was determined to change his lifestyle and life, take better care of himself, blah, blah, blah, blah, and more blah.

San even took a secret photo of him meditating in the backyard(which he found out much later while downloading all photos from the camera).

If this trend continues, people will start to think twice before they come visit us. Looks like everyone in the house has started taking secret pictures!

Just when things were going great, the little one came back with a small but stern cough. As is customary in this house, when kids are sick, they sleep on daddy's side with his left hand for a pillow and when they are in extreme distress they call out "Daddy!!!!", preferably after 3:00AM but precisely before 4:00AM and just as he looks at them and says "Ennada kuttyma?" let out a bellowing cough and directly trasfer spittle into his open mouth!

Daddy, who has somehow managed to get a Ph.D., is an evolutional retard. After going through this repeatedly with two kids over five years, he still has not figured out that, this whole sleeping with the sick kid is a bad idea. He just does not learn!

That fateful cough, coincided with Saturn moving to the ninth place in daddy's horoscope and at precisely 3:58AM the flag of the invaders was planted on Summit Daddy and when the sun rose the next morning, it was fluttering for all the world to see. The next few days were a blur. Daddy had been taken siege.

Did I mention the Saturn moving around to wrong places on the planetary belt, as predicted by famous astrologers? Apparently, Mr. Saturn can do a lot of bad things according to Hindu astrology, and as predicted, daddy's future took another nosedive. Almost ten years after marriage, he decided to have an affair!

Yes. We all know San is a stunner and daddy loves her very much. But as fate would have it, he was physically weak and mentally drained and in a moment of total weakness he succumbed to someone he met at the doctors office.

Her name was Codeine Robitussen and she was one sleeping beauty! She took him places he had never been to before and even locations which daddy had seen only with his dear wife appeared in a new light. Dad thought he had found the elixir of life!

The good news was that the affair ended three days later when the mother in law returned from India. She took one look at daddy at the airport, saw his clothes and said "You are a bloodly rag! and I am going to fix this for good." It was just daddy and the MIL driving back from the airport for almost an hour, with the MIL lecturing a quiet daddy on his habits and how her poor daughter deserved better. The MIL, had "Had enough!".

They came back from the airport, MIL's bags were unpacked, and they had enough material to open a small south Indian provision/sweets/savories store in Cupertino. Daddy had already broken up with the exotic Codeine and to celebrate, the MIL offered him and San sweets and savories. Daddy, tried small samples of every little item, only to find that they all tasted like "arisi maavu" aka "rice flour"! Had he been a carnivore he probably would have declared that they all tasted like "chicken"! This was a disaster. Dad had lost his sense of smell, sound, taste, needed windshield wipers for his watering eyes and was pretty much in suspended animation.

Then a miracle happened. He met the right doctor who gave him the right medicine. In the great country of United States, the probability of finding the right doctor is 1 in 10 and the probability of that doctor giving the right medicine is 1 in 10. The nine out of ten times you get that kid out of college looking up your nose and patting down your throat, you can bet your copay that you are going to walk home with stuff that will make you regret the attempt to seek medical help. That said, the chances of getting a screwed up prescription is very high and the calculation of that conditional probability will be left as a homework exercise for the reader.

Sorry, I forgot, this blog is not a math textbook! Let's get back to Daddy and his miracle. The last twenty four hours have seen daddy get back his sight, speech, smell and most importantly his sense of taste! Based on his recent self tests he concludes that :

Seedai tastes like seedai,
Murukku tastes like Murukku,
Karasevai tastes like karasevai, just as he expected!
Mixture tastes like Mixture,
Varuval tastes like varuval and surprisingly,
Sohan papdi tastes like Heaven!

Now that daddy successfully made it to work today, can talk again albeit with a slight cough and a raspy voice, even play with the kids and more importantly devour Sohan papdi like nobody's business...

We are one happy family again!

ps. This has definitly been daddys worse sickness in ten years and he has a newfound appreciation for family, life, love and all that he should appreciate more. He seriously believes he saw Yama driving a Sohan Papdi vandi with the big glass jar all empty, trying to aim his lasso to grab daddy into an empty tasteless world.

pps. We are not talking the Sohan burfis here. We are talking fresh off the bell jar, mouth watering, raw cotton!

pps. He also thinks Codeine Robitussen was one bad @$$ girl and he is better off without her bad influence!

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The doctoral West

It was the late eighties. A bunch of mostly Brahmin kids from middle class families attending a Central Board English medium school, in the heart of Madras (Chennai). The school, which has come a long way today, could be termed an "agraharam school" in those days. As part of the school chores was "pooja duty", where kids who had been initiated with their Upanayanam ceremony would perform the priestly duties for the Ganesha Temple, on campus. Let us just say that yours truly, a.k.a. "Sandhana Pottu Sundaram", could not have been more at home in any other school environs, considering his family background and upbringing!

In what way does this relate to the title of this post? Everything and nothing!

Nothing, because that innocent kid in me, did not know much about doctoral degrees, save for the fact that one of his older cousins was in the USA doing a doctorate. In fact I used to think that this cousin of mine was becoming a doctor (like in all Tamizh movies they say MBBS, FRCS, London .. etc.).

Everything because, in a turn of events that were unusual by my internal standards, but usual for similar middle class kids at that time, did end up doing a PhD in a western country.

Now before we proceed further, another note. This post is the serious response to this article. I am not going to generalize the attaction for the western education. This is my personal take on the "doctoral" quest.

Out of my 26 high school mates, I do not know how many actually went on to finish their Ph.D's. I am sure there are at least 3 and one of them is a professor. Of the 28 people who changed my life during my Undergraduate degree in IT-BHU, only two of us went for a doctoral degree. I went on to do R&D in a semiconductor company and my Chai partner has been trying to study the impact of colliding Kryptons with Leprechauns to see if we get super dwarfs, at Fermi Lab for 15 years now (D., I could not resist the joke. I do believe that what you do is fantastic!). Now that those stats are out of the way, I should address the two important questions: Why do a PhD, in the first place? and Why do it in a Western country when it could be done in India?

The doctorate was a means to an end. An ever changing end that did not need the means! I have failed miserably in my attempts to explain this to my mother over the last 15 years. So, I start writing, with lowered expectations.

I cried and threw tantrums just to join IIT coaching classes in high school! My mom did not like the thought of her darling son riding a bicycle from Mandaveli to Mambalam, what with the high instance of PTC(public transport) buses knocking down kids in those days! Grandpa convinced her otherwise. I joined simply because my other classmates used to show off their cyclostyled Balu class homework sheets during lunch breaks! All those neat arrowmarks, greek symbols and force diagrams did me in!

After I went to BHU, I was not interested in going abroad. My uncle was convincing me to start a small scale industry using my metallurgy B.Tech. Once again, it was those damn "word power made easy", Wilfred Funk and this other word book (I don't know the exact title but one of the authors was a Rosenthal or Rosenblum?) that did me in this time. Every Tom, Dick and Harry would be carrying copies of these books to Bihari's chai shop! There were two types of second year students, ones with the word power books in one hand and chai in the other and the others holding their chai glass with both their hands. You tell me, what would a boy in my position do? Naturally, I finished that word power book in one week after borrowing it from a buddy, and actually loved it.

By third year, I decided that these word power books were boring and went on to memorize the CED. I had gotten to page 81 in a month and finished the letter A, when I realized that the dictionary could wait, but the B.Tech. degree would not! At this point, the professors who influenced me the most (the mostly nostalgic idealists who lived in the past and told me stories of how in the absence of photocopiers in the good old days, a group of 8 students copied an entire book from a US visitor overnight in the dorm room.... you get the picture!), convinced me that I should stay in India and do something for the country by either starting a small plant or do my PhD in India and become a professor in the very same department. Yet again, peer pressure and the fear of the unknown forced me to go on and write the GRE.

By my final year, I had written every entrance exam there was to write. It was like a wave and you just got carried with it. Once you jump in, the momemtum of the crowd just carries you though, just like how San describes getting in and out of Bombay trains. You declare your intent to apply for higher studies in the US, and before you know it, you are in meetings where your relative test scores and grades are compared with your classmates and they are discussing clashes when it comes to applying to US universities. I had added oil to a well oiled piece of machinery.

While the deciding factor for most, to tick "YES" on the "Ph.D ?" box, was that it meant assured funding compared to applying for a Masters degree, I ticked this in hopes of actually doing a PhD. This had to do with many chai sessions with junior faculty, who were PhD's and had post doctoral work from BHU, IISc, Oxford (some of these dudes went on to become professors and HOD's). Thanks to their bitching sessions over a friendly cup of tea, I figured out that the waiting list to become a professor in our own department was long and many had become frustrated and gone back to the West or to the Industry after giving up their teaching/research dreams! They also hinted that the wait would be a little shorter if I had a PhD from abroad (32.5 years vs. 44.7 years and I liked the data at the time).

So the offer to do a MS at IIT Madras and the two local job offers were dropped in favor of a PhD program in the USA! It was actually a tough choice financially and emotionally. It was not seen as an easy way out from a doing the PhD perspective. It was only seen as an easy way out for becoming a professor, in India! At that time, I seriously thought that doing a Ph.D. in India would be easier than doing it in the US! Hindsight tells me that it would have been a lot more difficult, just going by the number of pages of printouts I took during my grad school years. Also, text searches on online library catalogs here in the US were much faster than the manual cross referencing we did for our undergraduate project! Just the literature search alone would have taken me an extra year in India. (Now the internet has leveled this difference! but remember, there was no www when I started my degree).

And now to finally answer my mom's question. "Sari, PhD pannarennu ponE. Professor aaga porennu sonne. Professor aaga ishtam illena, mootaiya kattindu thirumbi inge vara vendiyadhu dhane? Inge eththanaiyo college thirakkara. Evanaavadhu oru velai kudukka maattaana enna? Onnum illena Balu Sir aatum IIT coaching class nadaththu!"

(okay, you went to do a PhD to become a professor. Now that you are not one, why not pack your bags and come back to India? They are opening a lot of colleges here. Won't someone here give you a job? worse case, you can start teaching IIT coaching classes like Balu Sir!")

Life just takes you through a lot of paths, that you were not planning on going through! At least, it has been true for me. I like what I do for a living and actually enjoy it.

Would I have ended up doing this without a PhD ? Maybe not, it was part of my first job requirement!

Do I do things differently at work because I did a PhD ? Definitely. I have a different way of approaching problems (perspective, timeframe, complexity, documentation!) simply because of my experiences while doing the doctoral research and more importantly, writing a thesis. (Would actually recommend Master's students who have a thesis option, to take that option!)

Could I not come and teach coaching classes in Chennai? Sure I could, but do not know if I will be happy doing that!

In summary, I can point to lots of things, but it is mostly a middle class dude's aspiration to compete and show that he is capable of doing what is considered the best thing to do(at that time and place) that put me where I was over all those years! Just my take...

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