This is a plea to raise awareness of the apathy prevailing in the Intensive Care Unit section of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, New Delhi. My mother, deceased, was admitted to the ICU of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital as. She passed away in the very same hospital. She was administered under the care of Dr. S. Aggarwal, who unfortunately never came around to visit, much less treating her. The junior doctors doing the rounds always changed, each with his own version of the symptoms and the treatment to be administered.
If the doctors were indifferent, the nurses were a step beyond callousness and sadism. My mother’s pleas for help and support fell on deaf ears and she was repeatedly hit on her hands and legs by the nurses. Such is the true account as seen and witnessed by the other patients who were in the same ward as my mother. At times of crises such as when my mother would be asphyxiated from lack of suction on the ventilator which was her sole means of life support, there was no medical authority present anywhere. No doctors/ nurses were to be found anywhere. I myself had to rush and tell them that my mother was choking to death only to be told on my face that they were busy only to return to discuss the latest gossip among themselves. My mother lay in and covered by soiled and damp bedsheets. The response of the nurses on being told of the same was a retort to clean it up by myself. Such is the lack of medical attention meted out to my mother in the final few days of her life here on earth. Such apathy was shown to a lady who was fighting for her life and would probably have survived the adverse situation if she had been in an environment suited to a proper ICU. Such was the rush to get the beds vacated that the doctors and nurses tacitly and willfully let my mother pass away for lack of proper treatment. I was told by a person on the same ward that at night she used to be hit by the nurses. when she used to keep on calling out for her daughter who has taken care of her as she could not hear at all as her eardrums had to be operated on in the past.
Someone whose hands and legs are tied to the bed, who cant hear fighting for life? Does god forbid if this would have happened to your own loved ones?
This is written with the sole aim of making people aware of the dangers that they might end up subjecting their loved ones to should they decide to admit them to the ICU section of Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, New Delhi. May they not have to suffer in the eternal knowledge that their loved ones would not be separated from them because of the indifference of the caretakers of the society.
M.S