She has practiced medicine in two towns and raised two sons, both of whom became engineers and left for America. She managed the transition from Kurduwadi to Solapur, from a sixteen-year practice to a new town, from a young doctor to a grandmother with opinions about the profession she entered half a century ago. What strikes you, speaking to Alka Deshpande \u2014 now Alka Dixit \u2014 is the candour: the willingness to say plainly what changed, what was lost, and what she wishes had gone differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alka was born in Nagpur, the daughter of a lecturer at Government B.Ed. College. She attended Dharampeth High School and completed her premed education at the Institute of Science, Nagpur \u2014 the same college that sent several members of the 1973 GMC batch through its gates. She joined Government Medical College, Nagpur in 1973.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduation and internship, she married Dr. Mohan Laxman Dixit, a GMC Nagpur alumnus from the 1969 batch who later completed his MD in Paediatrics. The couple moved to Kurduwadi, a small railway town 62 kilometres northwest of Solapur, where Dr. Dixit had taken up a post at the Central Railway Hospital. Alka opened her private practice there in 1979.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The class of 1973 produced four Alkas \u2014 Alka Mehta, Alka Desai, Alka Parekh, and Alka Deshpande \u2014 and it was a distinction they shared without confusion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kurduwadi was not the kind of town that offered easy professional development. There were no postgraduate colleagues to consult, no specialist network, no steady supply of CME. What it offered instead was patients \u2014 railway employees and their families, and the surrounding rural population \u2014 who came with everything, and for whom a private practitioner was often the only doctor they could reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alka served them for sixteen years. She also worked for a period as a medical officer at Pimpalner primary health centre near Kurduwadi. The work was broad and unglamorous, and she did it without a support structure that any urban practitioner would have considered standard. She relied on what GMC had given her and on the judgement that accumulates only from seeing large numbers of patients without a safety net.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1995, the decision to leave was made for a reason she stated simply: the children needed better schools. They moved to Solapur, built a ten-bed hospital, and started again. Both sons \u2014 Amol, now in Houston, and Ketan in Santa Clara \u2014 chose engineering over medicine. She does not seem to have minded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Dixit Hospital in Solapur \u2014 on Wangi Road, Lamje Ward \u2014 became her next practice. She and her husband offered inpatient care and outpatient services until the hospital began a major renovation; by then, Dr. Dixit had also reduced his paediatric admissions, and Alka shifted her focus to outpatient work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She also served as a blood bank officer at Civil Hospital, Solapur between 2010 and 2013 \u2014 a posting that added a different dimension to her clinical experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What she observed across thirty-plus years of practice in two towns, she expressed with the directness of someone who had earned the right to say it plainly. “When I started to practice, doctors were almost considered demigods, and patients believed every word those doctors spoke,”<\/em> she said. “Things have completely changed now \u2014 a modern patient is better informed, has a healthy disrespect for the medical profession and refuses to accept doctors’ diagnosis and management as gospel truths. We need to be very careful dealing with a patient, for it is difficult to predict who will sue you when things go wrong.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It was not a complaint. It was an observation from a doctor who had watched the whole arc \u2014 from the era of unquestioned authority to the era of the patient with a smartphone \u2014 and had adapted to each phase without losing her footing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She recalled Alka Parekh \u2014 another Alka, from the same batch \u2014 who “never told her that she was fighting a lone battle with cancer.”<\/em> The discretion of a private person in pain, the death of someone who had kept illness entirely to herself: these are the losses that stay. She remembered Shakuntala Bhatia, practicing in Bundi, Rajasthan, far from Nagpur and rarely encountered. She missed the 2013 class reunion because of family commitments and carried a small regret about it. She looked forward to the next one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The four Alkas of the 1973 batch each found their way to different towns, different specialties, different lives. That they shared a name and a starting point in the same anatomy dissection hall is the kind of coincidence that only an archive like this one would bother to record \u2014 and that only the people inside it would find significant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\n\n\nThe Classmates She Remembers<\/h3>\n\n\n