I am in a ZOO

India is a zoo. The traffic is is a zoo. The hospital is a zoo. I literally see a zoo on my way to work everyday, today I saw: chickens, goats, pigs, cow, dogs, and turtles all just hanging out on the road and making the cars go around them!

I got to the hospital this morning only to find out that there were swarms of people wailing outside the unit. The baby I had been working with this past week with Neuroblastoma had past away from respiratory distress at 6am this morning. Then I see two of my patients sharing the same bed and when I inquired into the situation I found that we only had two oxygen tanks (one of then was being used for a severe patient down the unit) so they were sharing the last tank between them. On top of that, I couldn't take any blood pressures because we don't even have a proper blood pressure cuff on the ward! Of all basic amenities, this is by far the worst.......

Then one lady told us she was pulling her child out of the hospital because she and her husband could no longer afford to pay the medical bills (government hospitals exist in vain). The only thing the government supplies is the bed (families have to pay for the medication, the IV, the tubing, the injections, the Normal Saline, etc). Every government official should be forced to work for a day in these conditions and then allocate their resources properly. The corrupt nature of this institution definitely got the best of me today! We decided to send the husband back out to work and have the Mom just stay with the child at the hospital so atleast some income would be coming in.

Later in the day, one of our patients Jyothi was completely decompensating due to her TB meningitis condition. She needed to be on a ventilator (our one ventilator has been broken for a year and no one has bothered to fix it despite numerous attempts) and was told that she would have to be transferred to a private hospital. But since her family could not afford a private hospital, we would just have to wait for her to eventually stop breathing on her own, which truly feels inhumane. Her sister laid by her side all day today stroking and caressing her hair, with disbelief and a look of sadness I am trying to erase from my memory.

And to top it all off, Mustafa was gone! Luckily, she had just gone back home to her village but that means it will be nearly impossible to get her the fan I wanted to give her. Seriously, today was not my lucky day.

Hats off to all the interns, residents, doctors, and sisters (aka nurses) that work everyday in these conditions. I admire and respect them tremendously. It is not easy fighting a corrupt system, but they do their absolute best for their patients each and every day. Not only that, with the little money families have, they always seem to give a parting gift (fruit, sweets, clocks) to show their appreciation to the staff. For the poor, the money to buy that gift could be used for a meal so it goes to show how thankful they are.

To say the least, today was a tough day. One of my patients Diksita, was the ray of sunshine in my cloudy sky. She has diabetes type I and we are using SSI to get her a proper regimen. She is keenly aware of all the injustice that goes on around her but looks sweetly into my eyes, squeezes my cheeks, and says "aachi bachi."