Agitation remains word of the day

Seventy-five-year-old Bhuri Devi, who suffers from a kidney disorder that has become critical, lay on a thread-bare mat in the operation ward of SMS Hospital where she was supposed to be operated upon on Tuesday. Bedridden and in acute pain, her frail frame moved every now and then to keep her bones from digging into the floor. The abdominal pain and the hard floor took turns at keeping Bhuri busy.

“We have been waiting since 7 am. My mother was supposed to be operated today at 9 am. Leave operation, not even a single doctor has visited us. We have no option but to wait,” says Mukesh Kumar who has brought his mother Bhuri all the way from Khandela village in Sikar district, some 150 kilometres from here.

With little money in hand and nowhere to go, Bhuri and her family of four sat with 50 other families in one small, suffocating room which did not even have adequate number of beds or cooling. None of these families could afford to switch to a private hospital.

All these patients were due for surgery on Tuesday but were not operated upon because of the doctors’ strike which is expected to intensify today. Also, with doctors in other districts also having gone on strike, the situation threatens to put the entire state’s medical facilities on life support.

Strikes seem to have become an excuse for doctors to not even visit their patients in wards, where many waited for an update on their prescriptions. With doctors missing, even the ward boys decided to walk off; many family members were seen pulling stretchers for kin on their own.

But none of these problems seemed to grab any attention in the SMS on Tuesday.

“What have the patients done? Doctors are meant to save lives, why are they acting like villains? They don’t have right to leave anyone in pain for their own benefit,” said Mukesh as he patiently fed his mother small spoonfull of food.

Interestingly, a staff member on duty at the operation theatre, who refused to tell his name, claimed that as many as 22 operations were done throughout the day. But another junior employee rubbished this claim saying, “None of the operations were carried out on Tuesday. Doctors did not even visit operation theatres.”