spirit bandaging

Sunday - In the morning you decide to rodent around GMCH’s cardiology department, hoping to scavenge on some scrap of hope. You shamelessly pounce on an affable cardiac surgeon taking a round. The gent is nice enough to give you some of his time. The gist of things as they stand are this – there is no OPD on Monday or Tuesday as all the doctors are on leave. The nearest is Wednesday. You will have to come back on Wednesday, meet a cardiologist, then a cardiac surgeon, and then the hospital’s superintendent. Then at least you will know how much cash you have to arrange for. But that is Wednesday. This is Sunday morning. You are going to have to leave for now. But you know you’ll be back soon, for something’s being left undone is a calling card like no other.

On the ride back, you can’t stop peering back into the back of the truck to look at Maya and her husband. She talks with amazing, theatrical hand movements, as if always describing something big and wondrous. Her husband listens in rapt attention, as if proud of his wife’s cuteness. At times he sits down at her knee. Other times he sits on the bench and she rests her head on his lap. When we pick up yet another patient who’s had a rod removed from a fractured femur, they sit close together, their heads so very near as if sharing some secret joke. You could watch the two of them for hours on end. It’s one of the most ethereal sights possible – two people collectively disentangling and then demolishing the confusion most of us accuse life of, and just being .

You’re already fervidly scheming of how to get her new heart valves. If she dies, you almost believe you will too. She catches you watching through the glass, blushes, giggles, points it out to her husband and the three of you beam teeth at each other.

Rage

Saturday evening - The day culminates as a casserole of anger, hunger, frustration and fuck ups. It’s one of those days, as if you’re cursed with some mutant Midas touch, turning everything you lay eyes on and you experience into something worthy of contempt. Everything.

You hate your nursing assistant for being an ass and claiming to have said people have refused Maya any assistance at GMCH. You hate yourself for having taken his word. You hate the private Cardiologist you went to visit at a hospital that’s listed with the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund. He charged you Rs750 to sit your ass down on a chair for 4 hours and in the end tell you something you already knew (i.e. that the porcelain doll Nepali girl needs both valves in her heart replaced) and to hand you a certificate worth it’s weight in rabbit droppings. You hate yourself for not have seen it coming. The marble flooring and the airconditioning should’ve given it away. You hate knowing that a familiar self-loathing guilt germinating within you shall soon force you to pay Maya’s husband the money.

You both somehow hate and are relieved that you were proved wrong by an echocardiogram done on Bimla Maya. It is completely normal. She is fine and now can’t wipe a smile off her face. It’s amazing what 800mL of blood this way or that can do to the man.
But that you’ve basically served as an tool in GNRC ripping off Maya Tamang defiles this little victory completely. The meltdown is final and flawless. By the end of the walk out to the car park, you’re so livid you can’t even swallow your own spittle. Liquid lead.

There is no justification. I am down. Come and kick me.

Oh Guwahati!

And then there’s Bimla Maya. Yet another beaming, pristine, skin-porcelain-clean Nepali lass of 21 who came to you as the week’s second wheezing, sweating, nearly-not-breathing, ticker-barely-ticking heap. Swollen legs, gasping crackling lungs, the works. Her problems amplified by her having a haemoglobin count of 3, roughly a quarter of the norm. Two blood transfusions later, she is in a state fit to move. In the shorter scheme of things, moved to Guwahati. In the larger sense, you wonder towards what and where…..

Friday evening - Unlike most government hospitals, Guwahati Medical College Hospital (GMCH) does not wear it’s squalor like a badge or brandish it like a crutch to prop up a plea of pity. Considering that it is the end point of all of the NorthEast’s ill, it is acceptably clean. Another laborour we’d gotten admitted here for a prolapsed vertebral disc lies on a shared bed with his attender (just because the frugality isn’t advertised doesn’t mean it isn’t there).A case in point is that there is no anaesthesiologist. The only surgeries being done are emergencies. You’re told to take him back and bring him in March. So be it.

The other crusade commences tomorrow.

....without a clue

And so off to Guwahati – faraway city of Kamakhya and Cardiologists. Maya Tamang is a 20 year old laborer who’s heart bacteria have turned into a leaky plastic bag-esque blood pumper, which regurgitates half the load it should be forcing through her 5-foot frame.
Save the decaying valve, she’s like any of the button-pretty Nepali girls from around these parts.
Her husband’s brought around a thousand rupees for the trip. That and the BPL (below poverty line) card we’d gotten made should see us through. We hope.
The doctor I’m supposed to meet could not be contacted on phone. Network in Tenga is an utter and final bitch. An apocryphal practioner has already written Maya off. It’s something you just refuse to believe. Her love story’s something you choose to instead – married to a boy from the basti who used to walk her to school, at 17. Proud mother at 20. Wheezing, sweating, nearly-not-breathing, ticker-barely-ticking heap at 20 and 2 months.
Stubbornness is a gift. You have a lot of hope. You just have no clue. We leave at 0730……
At the back of your mind you wonder why you're so desperate to see this through. Considering you go about saying you hate the line of work.