an itinerant observer

One fine day, Cyto, the white blood cell, was on his merry way through the blood stream. His job was to look for anything unusual that could become a menace for Biloongra , the kitten in whose blood Cyto lived.  While he was going about his work, distracted by thoughts of some relaxation at Pool Plasma, Cyto noticed something rather peculiar. There was a large lump forming off the side of Arty, the artery he had been born in.  He immediately called his best friends, the twins Leuko and Lympho. LL, as they were fondly called since few could tell them apart, were better than Cyto in communicating with unusual cells that the three would encounter while guarding  Biloongra’s   blood stream. The three cell buddies looked very closely at the mysterious creature. None of them had ever seen something like that before but they all knew that it definitely should not have been there. Cyto called out to the unusual being. “Who are you and what business do you...

I will never forget the day when I learned the meaning of stress in the Emergency Department (ED). There was a massive multi-vehicle road traffic accident and many patients were brought in, pulling away most of the ED doctors and nurses on call, leaving the rest of the ED at my disposal. I was focusing on a procedure to save a man with a life-threateningly low blood pressure, when a nurse approached me with an electro-cardiogram of a new patient. Even at a distance, I could see he was suffering from a massive heart attack. And if anything worse couldn’t have happened, there was an overhead page for another trauma patient. I felt my blood pressure rise and I said to myself, “I can’t do this anymore!” What makes ED physicians not only stay calm, but function at the height of their game in face of an emergency? Some people may be a natural at this. But for those who are not, including myself, I have learned that we can rise to the challenge, eventually surprising ourselves. In or...

'Grow strong my comrade- that you may stand   Unshaken when I fall; that I may know   The shattered fragments of my song will come   At last to finer melody in you;   That I may tell my heart that you begin   Where passing I leave off and fathom more .'                                                             Will Durant Dr. MM Khan He was born in Mombassa, Kenya where my great grandfather was serving with the British army during the First World War. He then moved to a small town near Patna in Bihar. From those humble beginnings he rose to be offered a position in the US space agency NASA (which he could not take up for various reasons). His life's stor...