I read to Shri Husband a disturbing
item from a non-local newspaper. “A three-year-old girl died on a dentist’s
chair.”
Shri Husband wanted to know why/how
she died. Inquisitiveness runs in his genes. Always asking why this, why not
that.
“How would I know?” I said. “The paper
says she died for whilst undergoing a root-canal treatment. The girl-patient’s
parents have filed an FIR and are demanding that the dentist’s licence be taken
away.”
“Children don’t just die for no reason
at all. Filing an FIR is fine. Why take the licence away when the reason isn’t
known?” (See, another why.) “Doing a post-mortem is the correct thing to do; it
will clarify matters, tell us why the girl died. Maybe she was ill with
something else, something undiagnosed. Maybe she had a condition no one knew
about. The report that you’re reading is incomplete.”
Shri Husband’s first eight words
struck a chord. I remembered the death of a child in one of Goa’s malls about
four years ago. The newspapers gave it headlines for a day or two, then the
news just vanished. No follow up, no mention at all about the incident. No
post-mortem report was brought to light, or whether one was done at all to find
out the reason. Did the child have a severe asthmatic attack? Or a sudden
unknown allergy? Did she fall and have a fatal head-injury? Did someone kill
her by accident or intent? No one will know now. What was written as cause of
death on her death certificate? Did the doctor who signed it guess the cause or
did he know for sure? An unexpected, unusual death in a public place arouses
curiosity. I was curious then as I was this morning, reading the article from
the newspaper.
I read aloud some more: “This was her
third root-canal sitting. The first two times nothing happened. She felt a
little giddy the paper says.”
“It’s an incomplete report if they
haven’t interviewed other, senior dentists and paediatricians to know what
might have happened. Newspapers can’t or shouldn’t give opinions unless
specified tests are done on the body and the findings revealed. These days
media has become the judge for everything. How can one make an issue of an
accidental death? Besides, doctors have a right to know what happened to their
patients. A post-mortem is a must. That’s what the media must follow up.”
How could one have an accidental death
on a dentist’s chair, I wondered.
As if reading my mind, Shri Husband
growled: “One can swallow one’s tooth.” Some sense of humour, that. I didn’t
laugh. Then he added: “Maybe she had a rare reaction to a pain-killer, who
knows? The Press needs to educate itself, stick to reporting not passing
judgements. You see what they do when there’s a plane crash… even before the
black-box is found and the technical enquiries have started, they guess they
know what’s happened and flash it as ‘news’. Or they pluck local ‘experts’ –
same ones over and over again—to tell us what they want us to hear…”
Shri Husband in lecture-baazi mood, I
thought. I don’t talk much when that happens. Cancel the ‘much’: I don’t talk
when that happens.
“This wasn’t on television, but in the
papers,” I ventured after a few minutes. There was a snort that sounded like
‘same thing’ and in the brief silence that followed, I remembered some instances
during my hospital-job tenure.
A
doctor in charge of intensive care (ICU) had to treat a patient whose heart had
stopped just as the ambulance brought him into Casualty. The patient was put on
a trolley. Through the glass pane of the Casualty window, the relatives saw him
perform a Cardiac-Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) on the patient. What the doctor
did: tried to get the heart to restart pumping by physically exerting pressure
on the ribs/thorax, using a balloon-pump to force air in and out of his
(patient’s, not doctor’s) windpipe. What the relatives thought they saw: doctor
and nurses beating the patient hard on his chest, jumping around, choking him
by covering his face with a strange black rubber thing, filling injections,
making him convulse by giving him shocks. Later, one relative told me: “He was
fine when he came. They killed him by all that beating.” If, I had gently
asked, he was fine, for what reason was the ambulance summoned? It took a long
time for them to accept that the doctor had been trying to save the patient’s
life. And that patient had been without a pulse on the trolley even before the
doctor had arrived.
Another
instance: a child undergoing an MRI in the OPD collapsed and had a
‘heart-attack’. The anaesthetist present revived her (she’s now a grown woman,
a mother) but refused to let her get discharged until she (the anaesthetist,
not the patient) knew what had happened. Several tests later, it was discovered
that she (patient, not anaesthetist) was born with a defective heart that
caused her to almost not survive the sedation she was given.
The bigger mysteries of Aarushi Talwar
and Sunanda Pushkar don’t intrigue me. They’re over-discussed and there are
several motives/angles involved. In this little girl-patient’s case, trial by
media is stupid. But I’m curious. What might have happened? The reason for the
curiosity is because 99.99 times things go ok. And that .01th time, it gives
the doctor nightmares. No media covers those. My sympathies lie with as much
with the doctors as with the bereaved families.
Feedback: sheelajaywant@yahoo.co.in
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