Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital and Research Center

I thought I'd post a bit on Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital, since it's where I'll be spending a lot of my time this summer. It was built and opened back in 2001, and tries to offer top-of-the-line (for India) health care to all levels of the population. They offer a certain amount of free and reduced price services for people in India, run community health projects, and while they perhaps don't have state-of-the-art equipment, the equipment they do have is adequate. If I got sick here, I wouldn't have any qualms with the health care provided by this hospital--you won't get much better care in the United States.

Donna and I pretty much have free reign as to what we want to do here. That means that we can basically observe anything we want--today we went in and saw Dr. Kelkar (the hospital administrator--who deserves a post all to himself) perform a surgery on a lady with esophogial cancer. I've posted a picture of Donna and I scrubbed in for those surgeries.

A couple interesting notes about the hospital itself. First, it's divided up into four wings, each of which goes up eight floors. All eight floors look down onto the atrium, making the hospital look like a beehive from the inside. I've included a picture of the hospital looking from the ground up. As for air conditioning, one would think that a hospital would be air conditioned. And indeed, some places are (e.g., the Lasik area and the Operating Theater). However, the ICUs and most of the rest of the hospital just use fans going at full blast all the time.

One thing that's kind of interesting is that since the floors are so dirty (lots of dust and dirt getting tracked in from the city), whenever you walk into a special room like the ICU or OT area, you have to take your shoes off and put special slippers on. It's easy for nearly all women (who wear sandals the vast majority of the time), but not so easy for me and my laced black dress shoes. In any case, when you go into the actual OT, you have to take those off and put a third pair of shoes on. It makes sense, of course, since the floors of the regular hospital are utterly filthy. It's just a hastle.

Things are, in all, going well here. I hope to keep this updated fairly regularly this week with more posts and pictures.