I comforted my aunt by saying I could come the next day so she would not have to worry about attending the prayer. I went to the nurse’s station and asked her very respectfully as per the doctor’s instructions to confirm the time of the dialysis for the next morning. That way the results would be available in the early afternoon and we would be discharged. The nurse, a young woman, looked at me vacantly and said, “It will be at nine am or two pm. It could be either; I cannot say which until I hear from upstairs.” I reminded her that the doctor had said that we should be doing the dialysis in the am so if she could get us a slot for nine am it would be great. She literally repeated what she had just said to me word for word. It was like what I had said had been in a foreign language and she had not understood a word.
Waiting for the second doctor is what killed us. He did not come till 11:45 at night. Since we had made the mistake of all coming at the same time, we were exhausted and cranky simultaneously as well. The appointment ended. I went home depressed that we had to return the next day. The second day was no better than the first. We got the nine am dialysis slot and after that waited till 11 pm to be discharged. Fortunately, this time my cousin and I stayed there. That night, when I was on my way home, I thought to myself, as vindictive as I could be, I would not wish illness and therefore hospitalisation on my worst enemy. It is without doubt the worst possible form of torture with its two-pronged infliction: physical as well as emotional.
The ‘politics’ in medicine in the homeland is reflective of an egoism that is embedded in every aspect of service provided to the people. The bedside manner is what is most horrific: no courtesy, no respect, certainly no compassion. If this is what is happening to the literate upper classes, what is happening to the poor? People in power will abuse it. That is the nature of the beast, no doubt. However, making a bureaucracy out of medicine is the ugliest reflection of a society’s failure to attain civility. When the caregiver is indifferent, there is no hope for anyone. The hospitals act like corporations, greed is their adrenaline and doctors are just clocking in the money. In the US and UK these days, rich people pay over $1,000 an hour to ‘consultants’ who will advise their children from age three onwards about what to “learn” so they can land admission in an Ivy League school by 18. Too many people can afford the sky-high tuitions. Unless you can be a donor of the $ 100 million variety, where your child receives their undergraduate education is a gamble. In Pakistan, my advice to the rich, who cannot seem to do anything for the right reason, is to start donating heavily to hospitals, adding wings, giving expensive equipment in their fathers’ names, thus keeping one in their back pocket. Either that or find themselves on the other side of a line they are not accustomed to being on.
I hear people whine all the time about how the poor are uncivilised. They use it as an excuse to not do anything charitable for them in public spaces. “They will just steal it” is what I hear most often, even if it is something unstealable. But it is the rich who use contacts or money to cut lines and plunder the country without remorse or end. It is they who measure their own civility like slaves by how closely they can imitate the west or even India. I spent 48 hours in a hospital and it was a humiliating, frustrating nightmare from start to finish. Most of the people in this country spend the entire year and their entire lives feeling that way with no reprieve in sight. In such moments, it feels uplifting to recall that Pakistan is supposed to be God’s gift to Islam. If it is meant to salvage the faith and its followers across the globe, it will have to find a way to better treat its sick and needy. The general appears to be the marker that the past and present must not continue into the future. Otherwise, everywhere you look there are Gods of stone. All of us wait for the one who will smash them, the one who has yet to appear, in sight or sound.
(Concluded)
The writer is a freelance columnist