A TALE OF TWO NURSES

SUNNY THOMAS

Ever heard of Super Specialty Murder? Murder just a week before the centenary of shifting the Indian capital from the cultural capital of India! Hospitals across India are in a shambles – where new-born are roasted in incubators, babies are mauled by dogs, girls exchanged for boys, the marginally ill become terminally ill, water tanks degenerating into sources of contamination and even the doctors fall sick, blood transfusion causes AIDS or even death, and worse still, the poor are kidney-robbed! 

That a minor fire that broke out in the basement, which could have been extinguished in a matter of ten minutes by the fire brigade, was not even reported for full one hour and a half but was played around by four watchmen shows the abysmal state of management of AMRI Hospital in Kolkata. The pertinent point is it was only a minor fire that could have caused no casualty at all. Yet the hospital with no semblance of administration allowed it to turn it into an inferno taking a toll of over 90 lives! Obviously, fear psychosis ruled the hospital staff and the watchmen were mortally scared of the hospital authorities that they tried to hush up the fire and even attempted to do what they were not qualified to do.

What happened in Kolkata is not an exception. Medical practitioners across the country have become notorious businessmen, with an eye to the purse rather than an eye to the patient’s health. Any doctor who sends a patient to an MRI scan centre in Delhi earns a 50% commission, which comes to Rs 10,000 per case, or just a lakh for 10 patients every month. Many private practitioners are on the pay roll of MNCs and prescribe steroids that once taken will make patients life-long dependents. The MNCs profit, the doctors profit, but the health of the poor patient who may be the sole bread-winner of the family is ruined for life.     

In one of the most expensive and advertised of hospitals in Delhi, the parents of a youth who fell into a coma after a road accident were appalled that the doctors were persuading them to sell their son’s kidney to reduce the hospital bill rather than trying to save his life! 

Doing a reporting assignment during the heydays of the Nithari killings, a student stumbled upon the most scandalous revelation: the doctor, whom media nicknamed ‘Dr Kidney Kumar’ was spotted very often with the controversial nurse parking his van in front of the notorious house into which young girls were enticed and later raped and murdered, in Noida, East Delhi. The source of the story was the press-wallah’s wife, who stayed right opposite. The story could not be published anywhere else, except in the lab newspaper of Times School of Journalism, because the entire story hinges on the statement of one person, who could re-track her version in a court of law for whatever reason; and the media house that publishes the story could end up paying damages to the tune of Rs 50 crore, which it can do without. (So Kumar Sambhav, the TSJ student, now a prized correspondent with Down to Earth, learned early in his career that it is not enough to discover the truth to report!).   

             

Robin Cook’s medical thrillers expose the games doctors play in a world of unethical networking disguised in the fame and reputation of hospitals. His novel Coma that shot him into fame describes one such incident:  

Four medical students enter the freighting world of medicine in February 1976. Three of the medical students are male and one is female. During this time it was very hard for a female to succeed as a doctor. It is even harder for Dr. Susan Wheeler to succeed when she uncovers a horrifying deception. The deception she uncovers is that a select group of senior doctors at Memorial Hospital are taking patients into minor surgery and making sure they do not ever wake up. The patients are not dead; they are in a comatose state. Susan discovers they are harvesting the patients' body parts.

To come back to the AMRI story: Driven by greed and avarice, the management flouted all safety norms; they turned the car-parking into a store house where not only inflammable drugs but even gas cylinders were dumped; all emergency exits meant for the safety of patience in case of fire were blocked. Only the previous day was there a minor fire mishap, which should have alerted the authorities but the trigger-happy management would learn no such lessons. Instead, they suspended the watchman who called the fire brigade and averted a mishap of similar magnitude, warning anyone who ventures to act in public interest. So the inevitable happened!      

In this sordid drama of greed and avarice, emerges the story of supreme sacrifice: two tender nurses from God’s own country could not save the life of a ninth one because they themselves were consumed in the inferno. While doctors and paramedical staff and the watchmen who could have saved some lives took to their heels, the lesser privileged slum-dwellers and a man with no limbs, Debasis Chatterjee (37) along with P K Vineetha and Remya Rajappan, the two nurses, scripted the saga of exemplary courage. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee indeed stood by the relatives of the victims and earned their gratitude.  

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dicken expounds the meaning of true love in the noble deed of  

Sydney Carton in exchanging the prison cell (and guillotine) of Charles Darnay, whom his heart-throb Lucie Manette loves. Dickens demonstrates how love transforms the most worthless man into a precious gem of literary characters. The immortal beauty of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet lies in the fact that the spring of love comes up amidst an ocean of hatred. There is hope for human civilization as long as there exist the rarest of gems like Vineetha, Remya and Debasis.     

A memorial in honour of these martyrs at the very site to inspire the youth of the country is the most fitting thing for a government to do, while the nation salutes these immortal souls!