Date… Anyone?

I was busy in the outpatient clinic seeing new as well as old patients. There was one whom I had advised a transobturator tape insertion for urinary stress incontinence and a posterior colpoperineorrhaphy for a rectocele and perineal defect. She came back with reports of investigations we had advised. She was seen by an intern. She wrote the patient had come for a date, and sent her to see me. I was surprised why a middle aged, married, parous woman would come to the hospital to find a date. I actually suspected that it was for an appointment, not a date. So I called that intern and asked her if she saw anything wrong with what she had written. She couldn’t. I asked her the name of her school (school as in school, not medical school). She was confused by that question, but still told me a name which was unfamiliar. So I probed further and discovered it was an English medium school, not a vernacular one. Then I asked her why she thought a patient would go to a hospital to find a date. She thought for a while and blushed when she realized her folly. She had literally translated the patient’s request for an appointment for her operation from vernacular into English. I asked her to tell me her name, which she did. I explained I planned to put it on my blog, and that she would soon be famous. Though she dared not say anything to that one because I was almost thirty years her senior, and also Professor and Head of the department from where she would have to get a completion certificate, the look on her face was enough. I will not disclose her name here (I wouldn’t have, anyway!)