Chapter 463 Evil
“He was a very good man and we had a wonderful life together for 33 years.
It’s rare to say that nowadays, but I’m married to a man who has always been there for me and has always taken care of me.”
As Alti spoke, Ron couldn't help but think of the generous overseas trader.
Seven or eight years ago, he looked like he was only in his forties, with a strong body and a warm attitude.
"His family is very prestigious, with famous scholars and journalists, but he just likes business. His career is very successful, and we have entered a very good social circle. I know all the powerful people in Delhi."
Arti is soft-spoken, and even her expressions are graceful. It's clear that her marriage to Ranant is a perfect match.
“My family is quite prestigious,” she said. “My grandfather on my mother’s side was a knight. My grandfather was from Jalandhar and became the chief engineer of the National Railways. He was knighted and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.
Their family was well-known in Delhi and had been close friends with Indira Gandhi. My grandfather was a successful businessman and had bought a magnificent house in the embassy district. It was under his tutelage that Ranant's business began.
Tsk, Aarti spent several minutes talking about his class status alone.
Ron thought she was too much, a complete old money type.
Well, good luck to you, Mr. Jing.
"My husband has never been sick. He's 1.85 meters tall and very strong. He never wears glasses and has never been to a dentist in his life. All his teeth are his own, without a single denture.
He played badminton, and at fifty, even thirty-five-year-olds were often no match for him. He never took a nap, and in the thirty-plus years we'd been married, apart from a few colds and one serious injury, I don't remember him ever being sick.
"In August, everything went haywire. In September, he was hospitalized. He passed away two days ago."
"So what's his problem?" Ron asked.
"I never figured it out. I showed his report to many doctors. At first it was said to be a viral fever, but then he became very weak and had a low-grade fever for a while.
We did a lot of tests, and they sent us to an endocrinologist, who prescribed some very expensive medication. He started having cold sweats after taking it, and then he had a stroke.”
Artie spread his hands. "Look, he's never taken any medicine in his life. In the past, if he had to take an aspirin, he would cut it in half. He couldn't take so many medicines."
They started injecting him with antibiotics four times a day, charging him 5,000 rupees per injection.
I said, "What are you doing? You're just using drugs to make money, but I love him and I can see how these things work on him."
"They started chemotherapy without a diagnosis! They had no idea what was wrong with him. The doctors were all famous, and I felt like I had to do whatever they said.
But every time I listened to them, my husband got worse. He only got better when I didn’t listen to them.”
"I took him out of the hospital and took him to another one. I brought all his reports, but they still wanted to retest every single one of his parameters, which was absolutely excessive testing.
They said they wanted to do a lymph node biopsy, but his lymph nodes were swollen from all the medication he'd been taking. It should have been a simple procedure done under local anesthesia."
"The night before the examination, I was sleeping in the ward. I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night. The ward was dark and I saw a nurse in the ward.
She was standing by my husband's bed, holding a form for him to sign, consenting to a much more expensive test under general anesthesia.
Can you imagine, my husband was practically insane from all those medications, waking up in the middle of the night and seeing this nurse in the room and signing a piece of paper?
I told her to leave and told her that the doctor didn't say that. The next morning, I left the hospital with my husband."
These hospitals are all the same, cold and covered in blood.
India's healthcare system is an insidious combination of high prices and low transparency, leading to extreme panic among patients.
This only makes things worse, as patients go to twenty doctors because they feel they can't trust any of them.
So they interrupted treatment and changed hospitals, resulting in a lack of access to consistent care.
"We went to another hospital, which is this one. My husband started to get better and they prescribed less medicine.
Before we came here, his platelet count had dropped to 45,000 per microliter, and the normal value should be above 150,000, but his platelet count started to rise again.
After a few days, he was able to be discharged from the hospital. But they wanted to make more money from him, so they falsified the blood test results.”
"He was getting ready to be discharged and he was wearing a scarf. He hated being in the hospital and was glad to be leaving. Usually, the blood test results would come back quickly, but that morning they didn't.
He's already got his coat on, and we can't leave until the test results come back. There's no reason to worry; his platelet count had already returned to 90,000 the day before."
"I went to ask why the results weren't in yet, but no one could answer me. The doctor said, 'I'll call the lab.'
He looked at me, not listening to what was being said on the other end of the line, and then told me, "My husband's platelet count has dropped to 43,000. He needs an emergency blood transfusion."
"I panicked. If his platelets dropped so much in just one night, he would definitely go into a coma if he went home.
'I'm sorry, dear,' I said, 'but you need a blood transfusion,' I was so flustered it didn't occur to me that anything could be wrong.
I had to find a blood donor right away, and my nephew came from Gurgaon to donate. He was so thoughtful and went to great lengths to come.
When he learned that he needed 300 milliliters of blood, his face turned pale, but he still donated it.
"By evening, all preparations for the blood transfusion were complete. Before starting, they tested the blood again according to the procedure.
This time I insisted on seeing the results, and it turned out that my husband's platelet count was 90,000. In other words, his platelet count had never dropped since the beginning!
They wouldn’t show me the test results that morning so they could sell the blood transfusion procedure for Rs 50,000.”
"A Sikh doctor treated a friend of mine. He reviewed the situation and suggested, 'He might have pulmonary edema. You should be careful.'
So I told the doctors here, but they didn't care. Bastards! Then he developed fluid in his lungs.
The Sikh doctors also told us not to use steroids, but this hospital gave him a lot of them, causing his entire physiological system to fail.”
"This hospital killed him. They were so fond of prescribing drugs that they killed him. He had started to improve before, but after coming to the intensive care unit here, this ward ended him.
I was gone for a few minutes, and when I came back he was covered in tubes, groaning loudly, gasping for breath, and had burn marks on both sides of his neck that no one had ever explained to me.
I took him out of the ICU and told him he would die in my arms, not in front of these strange faces staring at him.
They put a central line in him because they didn't have the patience to deal with the swelling from the fluids. Two minutes after the line was in, he was dying."
“We have no medical insurance and have to pay all the expenses ourselves. The hospital wants to keep him on a ventilator for a month so they can charge 30 lakh rupees.
They also wanted to put him on dialysis because they had a new dialysis machine, but there was nothing wrong with his kidneys at all.”
The coffee in front of Ron grew cold. The coffee grinder behind him roared for a few seconds, and no one spoke.
"My husband used to dance tango and waltz and was a very strong man. When he first became ill, he told me: If I lose my legs, I don't want to live anymore.
But in the end, when I saw him in the ICU here with tubes all over his body, my spirit collapsed.
I said: Go, go, my dear, don’t stay in this world any longer, this is not the life you want.
I took him back to his room, played our own music, and massaged his head all night.
He was very peaceful, he didn't mutter to himself or make any noise, he just passed away quietly.
I had been with him all night, but he hadn't left yet. He knew that if he left, I would be alone.
He waited until the next afternoon, and when everyone arrived and surrounded us, he knew he could hand me over to these people who loved me.
Even at the moment of death, he was so thoughtful.”
Aarti was calm, at least she gave him a happy ending.
"I didn't expect the situation in a private hospital in Delhi to be like this." Ron sighed.
This was indeed beyond his expectation. There were many dignitaries among those who could come here.
But the hospital dares to do this. It's crazy and inhumane.
“They are money-making machines,” Aarti said. “They are driven by maximizing revenue, pure and simple, and that leads to a dangerous loss of medical judgment and ethics.”
She gave an example. She had a friend who was the chief surgeon in a public hospital and resigned to work in a large private hospital.
The other party offered him an annual salary of 24 million rupees, which was ten times his previous salary, but he was responsible for earning 120 million rupees in revenue for the hospital every year.
The reality is that even if he performs a full year of surgeries, he still can't reach half of this number, so the rest of the performance is contributed by diagnostic tests.
This is why the number of laboratory tests has increased significantly, and patients are being asked to undergo repeated MRIs so that doctors can meet their targets.
Some cases do not require surgery at all, but anyone with upper abdominal pain will have their gallbladder removed.
Most surgeries are unnecessary, but patients don't know it and are unlikely to detect any signs of inappropriate treatment.
There are no hospitals in Delhi that even offer vaginal births anymore because Caesarean sections are more profitable.
The medical device industry plays a significant role in the decision-making process for treatment options.
Because many doctors work directly for these companies and their patients don't know.
Drug companies give oncologists a 10% rebate on chemotherapy costs, with a typical rebate of Rs 1 crore for a month's course of treatment.
Pancreatic cancer is the favorite of doctors because if you get to the point where you have to do chemotherapy and you only have six months to live anyway, then the doctor will treat you however they want.
Some private hospitals are very shady. If you pretend to be a patient and tell them you want to buy a kidney, you will see where you will be taken.
Some anesthesiologists are connected to the black market for kidney transplants. They often go out to earn extra money and can do it in ordinary apartments.
There are also medical corpses. Not to mention the ones in the hospital morgue, some bodies disappear before the funeral is even over.
Just as Ron was shocked by the "evil" of the private hospital, the sharp siren of an ambulance suddenly sounded outside.
There was a chaotic sound and people rushed to the door to watch the excitement.
Ron and the others also interrupted their conversation and looked outside.
Oh my god! He rubbed his eyes. Is that Satya?
(End of this chapter)
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