Jatt and Daru

Middle age Jat man with a heavy alcohol habit (right, whats new). He is in a world of trouble. Liver has given out, he is jaundiced, his belly is swollen like a misshapen, genetically modified oversized watermelon. He is passing blood from both ends. I walked by his room in the ER, he was like a glow-in-the-dark doll. His eyes were the color of haldi (turmeric). His attentive wife sitting at his bedside and a neice in the corner with frustration written all over her face.

He was not my patient, I was translating for a colleague. This is a refreshing change since I have been in California. In Iowa, if a patient remotely looked south Asian-and I happened to be working in the ED everyone would wait for me to see the patient-regardless of whether he/she spoke Punjabi or not. Here, likely due to exposure to a number of different cultures, people are less apprehensive of a non-english speaker.

I asked the family what was going on. The patient had pretty much given up it seemed. He lay there quietly letting everyone else do the talking. The neice said, we have been taking him to the county hospital for the last two months-they take out some water from his belly and send him home and he gets sick again. We sat in the waiting room for hours-they dont care. Its worse than India! Ouch-i thought. We pride ourselves on state of the art medicine but we are being spanked by this poor family from India.

I asked his wife how long it had been since his last drink. Poorey chhey maheenay hogey daktar sahab chhadi noo (its been six months)-she said with a hint of pride (?) in her voice. I had to explain to the family that the guy was dying,that the only thing that would save him would be a liver transplant-and he would not last that long.
All the jatt and daru(alcohol) songs from popular punjabi music came flooding to my head-they rarely sing about this aspect of it, I mused. Shitting blood is just not that entertaining to sing about I suppose.