five years back, twenty sixth night of
September, a hospital in
Delhi, My Dad is Dead
it had been a great ordeal. For everybody, Dad, me, mom, family even the doctors and the nursing staff. 3 days and the 3 nights we kept tossing him from one hospital to the other. All he private hospitals had given up. They didn't even want to try.
government hospitals, though, by the virtue of policy could not refuse.
so there he was in
Lok Nayak Hospital.The doctors, the staff and every body around was so so fed up with poverty, misery,pain that their senses had gone numb. They'd become immune to disease, death,and worse even Hope
For every family, theirs was the greatest pain and in isolation perhaps it even was. But for the people with those blessed stethoscopes, the men and women who possessed the magical medical lingo, it was all routine. Just another day at office.Add to this the procedures of a government hospital...
the Doctors were still okay, they did understand but the lower rung office staffers were the numbest of the lot.
I remember when i had to donate a unit of my blood so that we could exchange it for a unit of plasma that he needed. Standing in those horribly long queues, waiting for the staff absent from their chairs, waiting for the extended lunch hours to get over, you felt so helpless, so disgusted that you can not do anything for your beloved.
Finally when i was able to give that unit of blood, i felt so happy. as if I had done some thing, at least my part in the entire gig....... It took 25 minutes for the blood to trickle out but it took 4 hours to reach that place.
In hindsight i can understand that it would be difficult even for the government staffers trapped in the red tape to go out of the way and help anybody even if they wanted..
And then he was no more. On the sixth floor of the hospital building, in his ward, he'd become a dead body.and they had no wheeled trolley i n that ward. I went to another ward, on the seventh floor. They had one. I requested them. It wasn't their ward and not even their department, they weren't interested. I pleaded them, they said no body brings the trolley back, they all leave it on the ground floor. I said i would. They ignored. I begged, i cried, Even offered to pawn my watch.
Finally hey relented and agreed to help. I promised i would bring the trolley back. On the round floor, just out side the door the ambulance as ready. We put him in and i turned back to take the trolley upstairs. A hand held me. It was my brother. He said we were getting late. I insisted i had to return the trolley. I was shoved into the ambulance and we sped away.
The people on the seventh floor would've waited for some time and then would've come don to find the trolley unattended. They would've cursed me and taken the trolley back. that was a hospital. May be another person would've died on the same night on the some other floor and his son would've needed that trolley... but they wouldn't give it to him
It is obvious... some one else would pay for what i had done
