INDIA BEATS
Crossing the bar
PANKAJA SRINIVASAN
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Arvind Bhatnagar and his team look after a hospice in Coimbatore and they carry memories of their wards like badges of honour.
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The staff at Raksha have but one aim. “To ensure the patients’ every wish is fulfilled.”
Photo: K. Ananthan
Total belonging: A patient with Dr. Bhatnagar.
The day stands out. Not only because it is Independence Day. With eyes streaming, we watch a woman with her head bent close to her husband lying on a stretcher, urging him to tug at the rope that will unfurl the flag. He is one of the five still living. They were 11 of them, just the previous week. Who knows who’s next.
We are at Raksha, The Hospice, Pain and Palliative Care Centre, run by the G. Kuppuswamy Naidu Memorial Hospital in Coimbatore. Its inmates are cancer patients for whom there is no other treatment left or possible.
Despite the tears, the mood is festive. Dr. Arvind Bhatnagar oversees the flag hoisting. An unassuming sort you think, but a glance at the outpouring of emotions in a notebook a volunteer hands over, and you know, for the dying patients and their relatives, he is a Colossus.
Bhatnagar is clearly uncomfortable with us reading the entries. He says quietly, “It is not about me. It is my patients who have given me so much.” And somehow, from him, this doesn’t sound trite.
Abundant spirit
He shares incidents that have left him marvelling at the human spirit. Take Elakiya. She came to the hospice when only 14 years old. In excruciating pain, she could not even bear to have the breeze from the fan touching her skin. Still, for a function she willed herself to dress up, put on a wig, and pose for a snap. She only insisted that her legs come in the picture. Why? She was an athlete before cancer struck her.
Dr. Bhatnagar says with a smile how most of them put their best foot forward for a photograph. Like the husband (he was the patient) who constantly argued with his wife. Till Bhatnagar asked them to sit close together for a snap. Soon enough, the man insisted the photograph be given in his hand. It was after looking at it hard and long that he breathed his last.
Bhatnagar lapses into silence. And Madhav, a volunteer at Raksha, continues. Sometimes, there is also bitterness, he says. And, recounts how a man refused to speak to his wife and daughter as they had not told him he was terminally ill. He died without speaking to them.
The staff at Raksha have but one aim. “To ensure the patients’ every wish is fulfilled.” It could be a demand for a slice of pizza from a person who is missing most of his stomach or a swig of whisky for someone else equally afflicted. Or quite simply, a desire to drink tea at a favourite roadside stall.
Serene outlook
“One of our patients was a bank manager who was a stocks and shares man. So, I would make sure I read up that day’s stock market position before I met him,” recalls Bhatnagar. “I don’t know why or how, but these people seem fully sensible to the world around and they are just like the rest of us, only a lot more serene,” he adds.
And, most have an uncanny sense of knowing when their time has come. “There have been so many instances when, for apparently no reason at all, they have taken my hands in theirs and thanked me, or like the young Elakiya, kissed me goodbye, and then died.” Most of them want to tie up loose ends and discharge all their responsibilities and then come here to die. A lot of them do not want to die at home as they feel it will traumatise their family. And Bhatnagar and his team are ready to stand by whatever they want. “If they want to go somewhere, we say ‘go’. If they say they want to return here, we welcome them. They are not made to do anything they don’t want to,” he explains. If the patients haven’t been able to go to the mandapam, the mandapam has come to them. Marriages have been conducted here.
More like a home
When the patients die, they are taken, not to the “morgue”, but simply, to a “side room”. The canteen is called “liquid section” as most of those living there are fed through tubes! Bhatnagar doesn’t wear a white coat, nor does he have a stethoscope hanging down his neck. And, the spotlessly clean rooms and floors do not smell like a hospital.
The nurses and attendants smile a lot and have an overwhelming regard for their doctor. Has he eaten, is he rested, has he taken his medicines, would he like a cup of tea…“This is my home and they are my family,” says Bhatnagar. And, each one there feels the same way.
There are many more stories. But, as it is Independence Day, Bhatnagar chooses to tell us this one. Hearing some noise coming from a room with a bed-ridden patient, the attendants rushed in to find the old man almost fallen out of his bed. He was trying to straighten the National flag that someone had stuck upside down!
(Raksha has a dormitory where patients coming from out of town for chemo or radiation sessions to GKNM can stay absolutely free. The staff also visit the patients at home for the dressing, inserting tubes, etc.
And, there is a crèche facility where cancer patients are cared for if their family members have to leave town for a while or attend to other urgent business.)
India Beats features stories of the unusual, the exotic and the extraordinary.
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