OH
SO TRENDY! THRASH A DOCTOR OR A NURSE!
She was a young and petite woman
with a soft voice and a benevolent face unlike the more common elderly shrill
and tyrannical kind. The general opinion was that she was a good nurse who did
her duties well. A few hours past midnight, she was called upon to look at one
of the patients of her ward.
The patient was a frail and elderly
woman whose lungs were consumed by tuberculosis and it must have been a few
months of familial neglect that culminated in making it so difficult for the
unfortunate old lady to breathe in air to stay alive. A few wonder drugs and
nursing care had prolonged her survival for some hours but her health was too
damaged to let her fight her battle against death with any degree of miraculous
success.
The men who flanked the nurse as
she approached the sick and decrepit patient had been well informed at the
outset about the lost cause and it so appeared that they accepted that eventuality.
However, when the nurse began to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation to
the unmoving body of the patient, a totally untoward reaction occurred. The
burly men, who were the sons and nephews of the old lady, immediately zeroed in
on the solitary nurse as their enemy and began to curse her with expletives and
then manhandled her. The equation in their minds was that since their patient
died at her hands, thus making her services ‘zero value’, she should as well
not be allowed to live! The malevolent temerity of their act was unopposed in a
ward where attendants of other patients were still undecided about which side
to take as if there remained a moral dilemma to them! The fact that a few of
them sported a grin each at the sight of several men beating a poor nurse was a
display of their equally ungrateful and prejudiced minds. They seemed to
empathize with the transformation of despairing relatives into uncontrollable
assaulters and savoured every blow!
When a handicapped nursing orderly valiantly
came to rescue the badly bruised and almost fainting lady, the emboldened
assailants saw the opportunity to turn their ego-driven wrath on a male and
their aggression knew no bounds! The poor fellow faced the brunt of the furious
onslaught for several minutes and was left bleeding from many sites. They
created a scene such that the doctor on duty could not reach his patient!
Herein, the sufferers were a nurse
and a nursing orderly. Several such incidents take place in hospitals all over
India where the life of healthcare providers is similarly threatened. ‘A doctor
or a nurse was thrashed today’ is news that is increasing in frequency and every
time such news unfortunately degenerates into a generalized discussion of all
the shortcomings of the medical fraternity and its ungodly malpractices.
Therefore a crime is justified again and again till it has become a trend and
nobody cares any lesser.
It seems as if everyone in India,
except the medical man, has the right to act in self-defense because the accepted
thinking is that the attendants with a patient have an emotional license to do
whatever they wish once things don’t work out according to their preference! Many
times, it is a sordid spectacle of ego-driven power play and histrionics.
It is noteworthy that all hell
breaks loose when the doctor evens the score of the blows on those who are
intent on causing him mortal physical harm!
