16/11/2024
I just wanted to avoid this, but it still happened right in front of my eyes.
No, those aren’t my words.
They’re hers, a patient mother, narrating her son’s story.
She gave the history of how her son had been burning with a high fever that just wouldn’t come down.
Desperate, she rushed him to the pediatric ER at a government hospital, hoping to find help.
But help didn’t come right away. She waited for an hour just to get a doctor to see her child.
And even then, it wasn’t because her turn had arrived. It was because, as she described, she began screaming.
But she wasn’t screaming out of impatience.
She was screaming because her worst fear was unfolding before her eyes.
Her son had started having seizures, something she was trying to prevent.
Her voice carried a mix of hopelessness and defeat as she narrated her ordeal. That is the reason I am writing the story.
She had brought her son to the hospital to avoid this exact situation.
Yet it happened here, in the one place she thought would keep him safe: the ER.
I don’t blame the doctors. I wasn’t there when it happened. I don’t know the details.
But I do know how chaotic the system can be. Doctors juggling five critical cases at once, each needing urgent attention. No time. No help.
It’s not easy.
So, who’s at fault here?
The mother, for waiting four days before bringing her child to the ER? She thought the fever would resolve on self medication, but it didn’t.
The doctors, for not seeing her son sooner? Overworked, overstretched, and overwhelmed, they couldn’t give her the attention she so desperately needed at that moment.
Or the system? The one we so often blame because it’s easier than pointing fingers at individuals. The system that I, too, am a part of.
She asked me, confused and searching for reassurance, if she’d made the right decision. If discharging her son now was the right choice?
And I had no answers for her.
I’m just a final year student.
