Saluting Baby Falak’s valiant keepers

Would you give your all, devote all your time, night and day, to save the life of someone you don’t know? What if you knew that even if you gave it your all, the best case scenario would be that the person would only have a limited life — that they may be brain damaged, that they may never be able to walk or speak normally — would you still think it was worth your effort? For 57 days, Dr Deepak Aggarwal and his team heard that question repeatedly. And sometimes, even they had doubts, like when nurses on Dr Aggarwal’s team turned to him while caring for Falak, asking whether it was worth the pain.

Questions that I couldn’t get out of my mind either, even though it had been three weeks since that little girl who we only knew as a battered baby, who we only saw strapped up with tubes and bandages, had her third heart attack and died. How is it possible, I kept thinking, that doctors of a government hospital had fought a losing battle so valiantly, that they had almost achieved their goal of seeing her discharged? This wasn’t the public healthcare story that we are so used to — of apathy, neglect and of resource crunch. This was a story that was promising to change our outlook for good.

“When Raj Kapoor was asked which of his movies he liked best, he said Mera Naam Joker — his most difficult film although it didn’t do well. Maybe, it’s the same with us. We tend to get attached to someone who’s so harmed, who’s doing so badly,” Prof MC Misra, who runs the Trauma Centre that housed Falak, explains to me. “In my four decades of practice, I had never seen a case like hers — a child that young who had been treated so badly.”

You can only imagine how damaged Falak was when you know that Misra usually treats the worst kind of head injuries in the capital — his usual being those run over by trucks or other vehicles. Those horrors were nothing compared to the 2-year-old’s fractured body, her skin punctuated by bite marks, her feeding only possible by tubes.

It’s easy to be at an accident trauma centre and become impervious to such sights. Dr Aggarwal tells me they forgot this coping mechanism when they met Falak for the first time, and they forgot other standard operating procedures too. Like when she was taken out of the intensive care, the nurses followed her to her ward, continuing to give her their intensive affection. “We were too used to seeing her day and night, her and the teddy we had hung from her intravenous fluid stand,” Sister Prabha told me. (The teddy was actually brought by a Tajikistani student studying in Jamia who staged a dharna outside the hospital till Dr Aggarwal allowed her to meet Falak.) No wonder, the nurses knew just how close you’d have to come to her, to get her heart racing. They knew how much she liked being taken for a walk in their arms, in the warmth of the sunshine outside, getting a glimpse of the love that she never knew in her lifetime. “I believe she was abused and hit because she used to cry so much,” Dr Aggarwal said. “The strange thing is she never used to cry with us.” When I asked whether this was Falak’s response to all the hitting, an extreme, criminal form of ferberising, the doctor wasn’t quite sure.

Neither was I really that, even after meeting Falak’s doctors, all my queries were resolved. I still didn’t know why this helpless little thing existed only for suffering; why when the entire country was sending messages of love and sympathy, when the hospital received at least 50 offers of adoption, she had to die alone.

It’s easy to be bitter about all this but I also know one thing. On the notice board of ICU TC3 hung a note from the nurses that worked the intensive care shifts. With a picture of Falak, they told her they missed her and wished her a better place. So what if the attendant’s chair meant for bed number 6 that she occupied for two months was always empty, these nurses and doctors ensured that she knew that like other little girls, she too deserved all the attention and all the care.

We reporters spend far too much time focussing on all that’s wrong with the system. I write this column to celebrate those government doctors and the hospital that got it right, at least this once.

Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News
On Twitter: @sunetrac