Saviour, not warrior in this battle zone

I am a physician working in a government hospital, which despite limitations, remains the only source of hope for the poorest of the poor. It is a busy setting, milling with patients, some satisfied, others angry at the inevitable delays.

In March, the situation started changing. We were asked to introduce new hygiene protocols, social distancing and wear bulky PPE kits, a daunting procedure. The situation worsened as the days got warmer. Tracing potential contacts and convincing people to quarantine remained other challenges, and then cribbing by those put in quarantine.

Amidst all this, whenever I switch on the television or glance through a newspaper, I am inundated with references to the coronavirus as an ‘invisible enemy’ against which we are waging a war. Doctors and medical professionals are being referred to as ‘frontline soldiers’ and ‘coronavirus warriors’. Hospitals are referred to as ‘war zones’ and public health strategies have been equated with ‘battle plans’.

The people of India responded to the PM’s appeal as a mark of respect for health professionals. But most were indifferent to the plight of thousands of workers who lost their livelihood amid the pandemic. As a result, we could see streams of men and women walking barefoot, carrying young children on deserted highways, with little access to food or water. Many could never complete the journey.

As I go to the hospital every day, I cannot help but think how far it is from a war zone. For us, it is simply a place to cure, heal and restore life. When I joined the profession over three decades back, I realised that as a doctor, I have to treat blood, excretion and fecal matter. These tasks fall in the lap of the ‘lowest of the low’ in India’s caste hierarchy. Do these hierarchies even matter when we are trying to save lives and protect humanity?

But in my professional life, I have been confronted with heart-wrenching incidents, and these stories have stayed with me — the plight of the seven-year-old motherless boy who saw his father, a poor migrant worker, die before his eyes shortly after coming to the hospital. An expectant mother who died in childbirth leaving behind a baby girl and two other young children. Neither of these died because of Covid-19, these deaths occurred due to poverty, squalor and infection which prevail widely in India. The hospital is not a battlefield, where we kill the enemy. Those who die and those who suffer here are among our own.

Our hospital, too, was honoured with a military salute and honour. However, I can’t help thinking that the real reward would be winning the respect of people in our public health system, where a public hospital would be equipped to provide quality healthcare to the poorest of the poor, where a doctor would be regarded as a ‘saviour’ and not a ‘warrior’, in an imaginary war against the disease, which is creating more victims out of poverty and deprivation.