Dear Kalapi,
As for the superiority of diagnosis and treatment in Canada, say, over that in India, there are a few points I would like to make,
not to contradict your take on the matter, which is a personal one and thus cannot be contradicted, but to supplement and clarify it.
Firstly,
unless the affliction is life threatening, in places like Canada, and even more so the Netherlands, where there is no private practice allowed, one cannot get an appointment for months, or even years for, say, a knee replacement or an eye problem.I had to pull a lot of strings to get my mother's cataract removal done fairly quickly when I was the Indian High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Canada in the mid-2000s.
So the treatment might be free, but if you cannot get an appointment at all, it does not help much. This is why any number of such desperate patients travel to India for such treatment, and the vast majority go back very satisfied and this even with hospitals in Kerala, not just in the big metros,
I do not know if Ovi's complication could be described as life threatening, but from what you said elsewhere, I would guess not. . So in Canada, she would have been told to wait.
This is of course not the case in the US, where you can get anything if you can pay for it. But as for the way Medicare and HMOs work in the US, you have to listen to my brother, a US citizen who has lived there since 1969.
Secondly,
the big private hospitals in India, like the Apollo or the Escorts ones, are as good or better than anything in Washington or Ottawa, and I have seen all of them. Even the Wadia institute of Cardiology in Pune where we take my mother is very good, neat and clean and orderly, and the doctor is superb. The free govt. hospitals are of course terribly overcrowded and tough to take, but if a Canadian hospital had to take the patient load that the All India Institute of Medical Sciences does, it would collapse in a week.
Lastly, as for diagnostic ability, while this was a small matter, it does illustrate my point. I once had a consultation for an eye infection with a prominent Ottawa opthalmologist, who charged us $85/- and promised me that I would be fine in 2 days and I could attend an important conference in Manitoba. Guess what, it got worse, and I had to last thru the conference with red, watering eyes, feeling awful. Then I proceeded to Vancouver for some work at our Consulate General there, and they found me an Indian origin doctor who found out the kind of viral infection I had in the first five minutes, and then gave me the correct medicine as well. He was educated in India.
I do note your point that it is not a question of Indian doctors not being good, but as for me, after that, I was pretty wary of the Canadian doctors. Then again,
the Ottawa cardiologist who did the comprehensive cardiac exam for my mother in 2006, and found an EF of the left ventricle of 34%, forgot to tell me that she needed regular monitoring. He sent the report not to me, but to our GP, and never bothered to discuss it with me, as should have been the case, and the GP did not understand the potential seriousness of her condition.The result was that last year, we suddenly found that the ET had dropped to 10-15% and if it had not been for our cardiologist here, who pulled her around, she would have passed away in a few months. And the person who suspected that the breathlessness and the swelling of her feet was NOT a digestive reflux problem, but might be a cardiac one, and ordered the ECG and then the echocardiogram, was not even a cardiologist, but an MD who was a GP. So what does one make of all this?
None of the above is to deny the validity of the kind of personal preferences you have mentioned, which one can always have in such matters. Even after living in 4 million dollar ambassadorial residences for half my working life, I still enjoyed myself the most in my nani's place in Tamil Nadu, one of those of huge, dark, cool old houses surrounded by trees, and a huge swing in the central hall. But kids are different these days.
But the fact is that Ovi is a tiresome nag, and the more Arjun bends to accommodate her nagging, the worse she gets. He should have continued to treat her as standoffishly as he does in the beginning, and she would have been just fine. But then he had to obey the wishes of his puppetmaster Purvi, and so here he is, a slave to both women, one absent, and the other, unfortunately, always present.
Any normal husband would never have stood for the constant
Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf kind of stunts she keeps pulling, He never promised to love her when he married her, and she knew that perfectly well. So why should he have any
pyaar for her now?
She wanted him at any cost then. Now that she has him, she is busy making life miserable for him every which way she can.
If she did not want a baby, surely there are any number of ways of not having one these days. Why did she not adopt one of them, instead of plaguing her unfortunate husband every waking moment? Nothing he does meet with her approval, and she has a tongue like a well stropped razor, that girl. I stick to my statement that she needs to be walloped good and proper, not perhaps with the football boots you and I had once contemplated for Arjun, but definitely with a pair of extra stout slippers!😉 And if I had been her husband, I would have used a hatchet and buried her, Agatha Christie fashion, in the cellar!😉
Shyamala
Originally posted by: Kalapi
See Shyamala, I disagree with you on your assessment of Ovi here.
I will tell you my real life experience. I am myself born and raised in India and more than half of my total living years were spend in India. But, even now when I travel to India, I double check every imaginary medical need with my docs here. During my first pregnancy, my inlaws wanted me to deliver in India, I just preferred here. Last time, when both my kids were sick constantly, I simply wanted to come back to the West. Even if I look around here, my Indian friends could any day prefer a treatment in the West than in India. I guess, we have grown accustomed to the treatment facilities, the way a doc treats his patient, his style, his way in explaining treatment options, his stating the basic facts, a patient having a say in his treatment'don't know what it is, it might be a mixture of these or something else, but after a while most first generation Indians simply prefers a treatment in the West. Maybe it is still the very different approaches to treatment in these 2 countries. I don't think that there is a dearth of good docs in India, but the difference is probably the approach and what is one accustomed too. So, I couldn't blame Ovi , who is raised in Canada right after the first year, if she preferred a Western Doc over an Indian doc. As for a wanting a 5 star hotel, but isn't that natural too'I mean my kids too complains the lack of infrastructure in India and finds it hard to adjust to small things'I thought it was only natural, for Ovi to complain. Besides, she can well afford it, so why not go for a Canadian Doc'besides; Canadian medical treatment is actually free too'.world class treatment is actually subsidized by the Government. I found it weird of Deshmukhs wanting Onir over a Canadian treatment'
Edited by sashashyam - 12 years ago
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