Chapter 462 Private Hospital

The man who got out of the car walked to the stretcher and helped the young man lift his mother up.

They tried to fit her in the back seat of the car, but she was too big and the car was too small.

The two distressed men couldn't bend her legs; they couldn't force her in.

It was an unacceptable scene, and passersby frowned.

Just then, another relative of their family drove over.

He hastily hugged the two men, then thought about the scene before him and felt very angry.

He rushed into the hospital and then came out with two hospital staff members.

They engaged in a heated argument, during which the hospital representative repeatedly repeated, "She is not a patient of the hospital. We cannot be held responsible for her."

"Their mother just died!" the relative yelled. "They need your help! How are you going to move them?"

As more and more people gathered around, the situation became very unfavorable for the hospital staff, so they had no choice but to give in.

A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived, the dead woman was loaded into it, and a small group of people left for the crematorium.

The crowd dispersed, and Ron saw the person he wanted to meet.

She was wearing a sari and huge glasses.

"Aarti, I'm sorry about Lanant."

"No thanks, he just returned to the arms of Lord Shiva."

Artie hugged Ron with red eyes. Her husband had just passed away a few days ago.

She was accompanied by two young men, whom Arti only said were friends she met at the hospital.

A few people sat down in the cafe, and Ron began to talk to them about the hospital.

"You two met here, right?"

“In the ICU,” Arti said, “we were there every day, sharing our stories.”

Aarti, who looks to be in her late sixties, is a member of Delhi's wealthy Punjabi elite and speaks loudly and confidently.

Compared to her, the other two spoke like mice.

"I hate it here," the young man said.

"What's wrong?"

"His mother passed away and he was devastated," said the girl next to him. They seemed to be a couple.

The young man's name is Amit. A few months ago, his mother, who was in her forties, started having difficulty swallowing, so he took her to a large private hospital in Delhi.

They did all sorts of tests during the two months they were there, but couldn't find anything wrong.

The doctor suggested taking her to see a specialist at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, but there were no wards available there.

And the specialists didn't have time because half of them had resigned and gone to a private hospital, which was the one they were sitting in now.

A specialist asked Amit to come to this hospital to make an appointment, and Amit did so.

The doctor spent three days running various tests and diagnosed his mother with polymyositis, an inflammatory muscle disease.

Amit, dressed in a shirt and jeans, silently pulled out a photo of his mother, a plump, smiling woman in a sari.

“That was before she fell ill,” Amit said. “The doctor told us we needed to give her an injection right away, which would cost 400,000 rupees. I said I didn’t have that much money, so I called my uncle and asked if he could lend me some.

The doctor said the injection would help my mother's muscles recover, and there was no other option, so we agreed."

After administering the drug, the doctor sent Amit's mother home and told Amit to feed her protein powder through a nasogastric tube.

But when she got home, her lungs were filled with saliva that she could neither swallow nor cough out.

They were afraid she would choke to death, so they rushed her back to the hospital in the middle of the night.

Doctors put her on an oxygen mask and diagnosed her with pneumonia.

The next day, more tests showed her kidneys were also infected, and she was immediately transferred to the intensive care unit.

"The doctor remained calm and said: 'I knew this was going to happen, but if I had told you all the side effects of these immunoglobulins, you wouldn't have taken them.'"

He put Amit's mother on kidney dialysis, and eventually a temporary tube in her arm was replaced with a permanent tube in her chest.

The doctor then began to process the saliva in her respiratory system. He gave her another dose of immunoglobulin to enhance the immune function of her lungs, and then cut open her trachea to suck out the saliva.

“They said she only needed 15 days of treatment,” Amit said. “But two weeks later, they said she needed a permanent tube. It’s only temporary now, and the permanent one will cost another 75,000 rupees.”

"Wait, I remember your mother just had difficulty swallowing at first?"

"yes."

"But they're going to put her on kidney dialysis?"

"That's right." Amit nodded.

"How did the disease develop to this point?" Ron was a little confused.

"No one knows," Artie said, shaking his head with a wry smile. "Just listen to him and continue."

Amit continued, "We spent a lot of money. The ICU charge was 16,000 rupees a day, and oxygen and dialysis were 45,000 rupees a day. Every night, I had to go to all my relatives in Delhi to borrow money. Some relatives even lent us the money they had saved for their wedding."

"You don't know what to do. When the person who raised you is lying in a hospital bed, you're so emotional that you can't think straight. That's how they succeeded."

"For weeks they kept saying 'your mother is getting better'. We were getting hopeful, and then they said 'she's not getting better'."

Ron and the others were very quiet, Amit's voice was very dull, and they all gathered around to listen to him.

Artie sipped her coffee and looked out at the hot morning and the manicured garden.

“At the same time, her platelet levels dropped to a dangerous level and her saliva was not under control, so she could no longer speak every day, let alone eat on her own.

The doctor suggested another medicine, which cost Rs 1.7 lakh and claimed that it could restore her body system and control her saliva production.

But after taking the medicine, it still had no effect. The doctor said: Of course it didn’t work, all the medicine was washed away by dialysis.”

"It was like hell there, the mortality rate of patients in the intensive care unit was very high, it was a panic all the time, and there was no one to take care of my mother.

The doctors never see her, there's no contact between them and the patient. We can't go in to see her, they never tell me anything, just say 'she needs more medicine'.

We were left with nothing to do but pay the bills, which we received every evening from the day and paid with cash borrowed from relatives.

If you go to the hospital accounts department, you see piles of 1,000-rupee and 500-rupee notes being sent to the bank.”

Aarti suddenly scoffed with a mocking laugh while Amit continued with his story.

"We asked to take her out of the ICU because it was too expensive. So they put her in a regular ward and we could finally be with her.

But her condition was very bad, she had bedsores. She kept crying and her only words were: "Take me away!"

“We asked the doctors what to do and they said: She won’t eat, we need to make a hole in her stomach so we can feed her.

While we were discussing this with the doctor, a nurse came in and told us my mother had passed away.”

When recalling this, Amit burst into tears.

"And you know what the doctor said? He said: Maybe if we put her back in the ICU and put her on a ventilator, she'll come back to life, so we can try that.

Then I said, there is a condition, I have to stay by her side and watch over her the whole time.

The doctor said that family members are not allowed to enter the intensive care unit.

So we said, we’re not going to do it.

The doctor said, “Okay, if you don’t want your mother to survive… I mean there’s a 1% chance that she can survive. Who are you to decide that she shouldn’t survive? But if you don’t have the money…”

"But we quit. It was over. We told the doctor that, and he passed away."

"We went in to see my mother, and someone came to collect the remaining medical fees. They said to us over her body: 'You still have 200,000 rupees to pay, please settle it.'

They said this in front of her dead body without showing any respect.

In India, we respect the dead. You know what? They were disrespectful.”

"During the cremation, the priest told us that her bones had already rotted away, having rotted away when she was in the hospital," Amit's girlfriend interrupted.

"People are dying for no reason," she said. "At least we have some money. We've had people whose insurance ran out and they were kicked out of the hospital on the operating table, without the doctors bothering to sew them up. Of course, people with no money don't have that opportunity."

Ron was also shocked by what he heard. This was a high-end private hospital in Delhi, and they were completely disregarding human life.

He suspected that the doctors had not even diagnosed what was wrong with Amit's mother.

Or they know, but deliberately try all the treatments.

In short, the patient was cured and money was made.

Those who come to this hospital are all middle class or elite, so it is even harder to say what the situation is like when poor people get sick.

"Is this the hospital?" Ron looked up and looked around.

"Yes, an expert from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences introduced me."

To be honest, from the outside, this hospital is very nicely decorated.

There is a sign at the entrance, the same sign that every Indian hospital has: Prenatal fetal sex testing is illegal.

No one knows whether it will work or not, but the necessary slogans must be there.

"Since they are experts at a public medical school, how could they be so negligent towards the patient? They should be experienced."

“Things are different now,” Artie said. “Hospitals have become a business.”

"They dare to do anything, things you can't imagine," Amit emphasized.

"How do you say that?"

"Let me tell you," Artie began, "I've been there myself."

"Huh?" Ron looked at her in surprise.

"Yes, my husband, Lanant, he also died in this hospital."

(End of this chapter)