My Doctor My God

Earlier an expression of trust is now a statement of horror. Here’s why. When I read that post, I was choking. My throat was dry & my eyes had welled up.

I have a 5 year old daughter. It was a natural birth. I know the pain, happiness, trauma, expectation, anguish & the endless wait we go through to see the first glimpse of our baby & these bloody people discussing horoscopes & giggling & the mother isn’t even aware of what just happened!!! This is terrible. I was stunned to read about their insensitivity. For them it is just another "case" but for the mother & family it is LIFE! For god's sake! How horribly irresponsible to not check on the baby's breathing on time! A slip up in ‘a small procedural thing’ can cause such irrevocable physical/mental damage to the development of the child in the future & these people aren't even bothered!

I can’t bear thinking a life could be so handled. I kept thinking, “My God! Is this how it happens ‘sometimes’???” I had goose bumps on me realizing that this HAS happened & for all I know, might be happening in other places too. How can they be so callous? Those three people who handled the birth? What if it had happened in my case, what if it is happening right now, this very instant, in some part of the city? My heart aches for every child who may be deformed or suffers lifelong because of the coldness of some doctors; for mothers who bear their child in their womb for 9 months waiting every moment to see & hold a healthy baby in her hands & instead might have only a dead one thanks to the ‘small mistake’ by a medical staff. I wonder what else might be happening inside the labor wards. The mistakes committed by the docs which the families never come to know of & suffer lifelong & instead think that god was cruel or unkind to them or blame their "fate." My heart goes out to every family that has been wronged thus. What do we call this – carelessness, apathy, or disrespect for human life? No accountability at all? Negligence by the medical staff is unpardonable.

An article in The Week (13th Nov’11 issue) talked of how “infant deaths have become so common that they no longer shock the health authorities. Half the mothers give birth in the absence of skilled health personnel. In hospitals across the country posts for doctors are vacant. Lack of political will is responsible for poor state of health care in the country. “We buy equipment for one hospital & manpower for another – and both remain underutilized” – was what a former health minister said in an interview. UNICEF report states that of every four infants dying worldwide one is in India”.

If there are doctors reading this, I BEG you, help your staff understand the criticality of such negligence. Your small mistake may haunt us all our lives. Our lives are not so cheap nor our emotions so easily replicated. You may say this is just 1% of the cases, but Pls remember in that 1%, I am there too. Recall my face & my trust in your expertise, recall how I blindly believed your words & followed your instructions, remember you are no less than God for me at the instant when I'm trying to bring my baby into this world. I'm helpless. But pls don’t take advantage of my helplessness or my ignorance. I'm completely at your mercy. Yours is a profession unlike any other. Don’t treat it as joke. Don’t play with lives that are entrusted into your hands. Don’t kill a baby by giving it a life marred by disability. Don’t be so inhuman.

I don’t believe in New Year wishes. But today I just want to pray that let the coming year be a year where there is no birth riddled with such complications & carelessness. May the mother with money & the mother without money be treated the same way. May their deliveries be handled with care and compassion. May we not be another ‘case number” in your files.