The date, February 9, 2022, starts haunting me whenever I come across the news of a strike by doctors or para-medic staff as it was on that morning that I had a heart attack. Though I was in great pain, I instructed my family members to rush me to a nearby government medical college hospital and not any private health hub.
Two and a half years later I still wonder what would have happened had the doctors gone on strike at that moment. I was first put in the emergency room, where the same night the patient just beside my bed breathed his last. The hospital authorities repeatedly asked his family members not to weep loudly as it would have a negative impact on the other patient, that is myself. I was lucky to survive but had the doctors gone on strike I, and many others in the hospital, would have died. As usual, there were several hundred patients hospitalised there at that point of time, many of them in critical condition.
After recovery, the next day, I was shifted from the intensive care unit to the ward where another patient died a night before my release on February 14. In the initial 18 months, I used to go for routine check-ups at the outdoor patient department (OPD) of the same government hospital every three months.
Following much insistence from family members and friends, I agreed to seek a second opinion from a reputed doctor whose clinic is not very far away from my home. After further tests, he more or less prescribed me the same medicine.
Enriching experience
My decisions to go to a government hospital after the heart attack and to OPD for more than one and a half years were not appreciated by some of my family friends, because they did not have faith in it.
Apart from other factors, strikes at frequent interval was one of the reasons for their reluctance to get treated in that particular government hospital whose short form is PMCH. But naughty school children would ask their friends its full form. If he or she replies correctly, they would cut in to say: Patients Marna Chahta Hai. (Patients wish to die).
But for me, it was an enriching social experience. In the last two decades, I rarely go out of my house because of my vision problem. Yet my about six days in the hospital and subsequent trips to overcrowded OPD helped me enormously in understanding society once again. It was an eye-opener as I came to realise how much everything had changed since my field reporting days as a journalist.
How is it that lower middle class and poor people throng these government hospitals? They come from hundreds of kilometres with the hope of getting treated. And many of them like me are fortunate.
A north Bengal hospital. Photo: By arrangement.
Corporate hospitals
In this era of corporate hospitals, even those who cannot afford them prefer expensive private treatment. For this, they borrow money on interest or even beg. Till the 1990s, this was not possible as there were very few corporate health hubs, and most of them were situated in metros. Even the millionaires had to go to government hospitals and attendants had to sleep on the floor – like in my case.
Politicians and bureaucrats too would get hospitalised here, though they would get preferential treatment. This would at least provide an opportunity for improvement in the premier government hospitals in the state capitals as well as Delhi – if not elsewhere in the country.
Now all this class of patients have shifted to corporate hospitals. Only in some complicated cases the creamy layer of society goes to prestigious government hospitals like AIIMS.
The tragedy is that even in this era of information explosion the plight of the patients of the government hospitals coming from the low-income group hardly get highlighted – even during the time of doctors’ agitation.
Turning a blind eye
So, when the doctors went on the warpath almost all over India for several days following the horrendous crime committed at the R G Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9 the worst sufferers were the poor patients. They had to face this enormous hardship and risk their lives for no crime of their own.
There were women in the final stage of the family way, cancer, heart, kidney, liver, lungs, etc., patients. Many died unattended while the disease of others got complicated. At several places, the accident victims were left to bleed to death. They are usually rushed to the government hospital where, on strike days, there is hardly anybody to take care of them.
A friend of mine suffering from a critical disease had to go a third operation within six months. His sugar level was very high and was suffering from blood pressure.
However, when everything got stabilised, August 14 was fixed as the date of the final operation. On August 13 night, he was administered medicine and given sleeping pills. He slept well. On August 14 morning, he was taken to the operation theatre. When the operation was about to start some resident doctors of this prestigious institute rushed in and disrupted the process as the strike call was given by them. This incident took place not in West Bengal, but in a city in some other state.
Imagine just what would have been happening to the poor patients of government hospitals in West Bengal. My friend finally underwent the operation on August 21, but had to pay Rs 2,500 per day for an extra seven days for the room he had booked in that hospital. He was the local patient of that city. Imagine what would have happened had the patient been from any far away obscure place.
Hardly any electronic media covered this aspect while some newspapers did carry a few stories. The opposition parties and civil society groups were well within their right to back the doctors’ fraternity. But they had to draw a line. Even the Left parties, which champion the cause of the downtrodden, failed to take up their plight. They also failed to expose the fact that private health hubs minted money in these days of nationwide doctors’ agitation.
The Supreme Court, the media, the opposition parties and civil society rightly denounced the vandalism at R G Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 14-15 night. But nobody ever asked the rampaging doctors as to how can they turn away patients from OT or disrupt the treatment of serious patients hundreds of kilometres away from West Bengal. This is also a crime.
This pain of the poor lot can not be understood by our politicians, bureaucrats, judges, media persons and other well-off ladies and gentlemen who rush to five-star health hubs even for normal cold and cough.
The young mothers who died at the time of childbirth because of the absence of timely treatment in about these two weeks of agitation were also women.
The perpetrator of the crime on August 9 in R G Kar Hospital was a civic volunteer of Kolkata police, who was supposed to guard the hospital. And those who hushed up the matter were the same doctors at the helm of affairs there. If it was an inside job then, why were lakhs of voiceless patients made to pay the price?
Soroor Ahmed is a Patna-based freelance journalist.
