By the time I returned to ward 100 from the SSB office, the number of reporters outside the building had considerably increased; they now started bombarding me with questions.
‘Has the hospital completely run out of oxygen?’
‘Yes, the liquid oxygen is over. But we are managing with jumbo oxygen cylinders.’
‘How many kids have died? When will you restore the liquid oxygen?’ The questions would not stop.
‘I am not the right person to answer your questions. Please talk to the Principal or the head of our department,’ I said.
My reply was met with angry shouts, ‘But where are they?’
– An excerpt from Dr Kafeel Khan’s book.
That’s the million-dollar question. Where were the higher-ups, those with decision making power on that tragic night? On August 10, 2017, BRD Medical College allegedly ran out of liquid oxygen, which resulted in the death of 65 infants and 18 adults over the next two days. Dr Kafeel Khan has chronicled the series of events that have unfolded since.
In a hospital, electricity and water can be interrupted but never oxygen. So why and how did the oxygen supply get interrupted? Short answer: non-payment of bills to their oxygen supplier, but the larger answer is more insidious, one that requires a longer look into the bureaucracy, the enlightenment and the corruption that exists in the Indian systems.
In his own words, he was the junior-most lecturer in the Paediatrics department at Baba Raghav Medical College’s Nehru Hospital, who experienced this colossal tragedy unfold in front of him. In his own words, he described the harrowing times he went through just because he chose to speak up against the corruption and the dereliction of duty in his book ‘The Gorakhpur Hospital Tragedy: A Doctor’s Memoir Of A Deadly Medical Crisis‘.
A doctor gets a call near midnight from a panicking junior doctor that they are running out of oxygen. That doctor doesn’t have the administrative or financial power to take decisions. Still, he rushes to the hospital, calling all the higher-ups, from the HOD of the Paediatrics Department to the Principal of the tertiary hospital. He’s met with false promises at best and apathy at worst.
He runs around the night, arranging oxygen at his own expense because he feels the pain of the parents depending on the hospital to keep their children alive. You see, he has an 11-month-old at home. His patients keep dying throughout the night, but the junior doctors and nurses keep trying to do their job.
Finally, the media gets a hint of the situation and starts sniffing around, and so do the higher-ups. Then the blame game and fudging of the truth starts. It’s not about the deaths of the children anymore. It’s about saving your own neck and coming out looking good.
‘Why are we doing this, sir?’ I asked him.
‘The media is making such an uproar that we need to show how, as in this month, deaths happen every year during a specific period because of encephalitis,’ he said.
‘But sir, most of the deaths took place in the NICU and newborns don’t get encephalitis.’
‘Do you think these journalists are so brainy?’ Ah-ha-ha…’
– An excerpt from Dr Kafeel Khan’s book.
The above conversation took place with the head of the medicine department, who is also the husband of the HOD of the Paediatrics Department.
Dr Kafeel talks at length of his duty as a doctor, his arrest and his stint in prison. Throughout the book, he tries to make sense of why he was arrested for doing his duty. It’s an insightful read into one of the most meaningless tragedies India has seen in modern times, a first-hand account from a doctor on duty. The first part of the book details just the two three days of his life as a doctor at BRD Medical College, and the rest is his account as a prisoner housed in Gorakhpur Jail, incidentally near his old workplace. He does a beautiful job of narrating his side of the events; it is his memoir.
As a reader, it’s not a light book. The language and the content are easy to understand, with a detailed accuracy of names and places. But the subject of the book, which deals with the deaths of so many people and children, and the incarceration of the very doctor who was trying his best to save these lives, is going to induce tears.
There are different versions of a single event, and to understand the whole truth, we have to glean through all versions of the same and arrive at our own understanding of it. It’s a hard look at some realities we Indians face. Anyone looking to understand our healthcare system and prison system needs to pick up this book.
The past two years have seen an unprecedented global pandemic, with India reeling from acute oxygen shortage, which had people begging on social media, on WhatsApp groups, on TV for one cylinder of oxygen, getting scammed, paying exorbitant amounts for something all living beings need. Our healthcare system was scrambling to save as many lives as possible with scarce resources, but Gorakhpur witnessed this in August 2017. The tragedy is we didn’t learn a thing from it.