Like most people, you have probably made at least one trip to the hospital in your life. Not necessarily for an emergency situation, but maybe for a checkup, a consultation with a dermatologist, to show an ear infection to the ENT specialist. Or may be you have accompanied a sick relative aor friend to a clinic for moral support.
      Most of us younger city-dwellers have started our lives in hospitals, and many of us will end our lives in them. The hospital, therefore, is a necessary part of our modern-day existence; a city's progress can be measured by the number of hospitals it has to cater to its population's health and welfare ( the quality of the hospitals in the said city is another matter altogether ). If you are a robust person and do not visit hospitals very often, or if you are a television addict, like me, your impressions of hospitals are probably polluted by medical dramas on TV, such as Chicago Hope and ER, where every moment a daring surgery is performed, a life-saving decision is made, doctors are gods and nurses are angles. In these shows, squealing ambulances pull up in the dead of night, depositing dozens of gunshot victims, people sit in emergency rooms with arrows pierced through their heads, teenaged mothers go into labour every forty seconds, and so on and so forth.
     It's been a long time since I had the occasion to visit a hospital, but I went recently on a trip to a nearby one for something very routine, the nature of which I will not disclose because this is a newspaper column and you do not need to know about my allergy to cat hair. I had some time before the appointment so I decided to wander around the hospital a bit, just for curiosity's sake.Next>