On a serious note........

Little over a year ago when my younger one was born, there was this friend of mine from Bhubaneswar who joined me with his share of good news announcing the arrival of his son – incidentally his second one and our elder ones, both girls, are buddies too. We celebrated together as our kids were separated at birth by just one day. Well, I have this envious thing called celebrating my birthdays together with friends and saying ‘same to you’ after being wished. Any ways, that is not even a distant point that I am driving home here. This friend of mine (not revealing his name here, as I have not spoken to him abt my blog) and I keep meeting every now and then chit-chatting (we call it khati in local lingo) over almost all the things under the sky. Our elder daughters were going to the same dance school. Hence we used to catch up every week at least once while dropping or picking up the girls. Not seeing him there for few weeks, I took my legs to his place to steal a glance of his wellbeing. He was not to be seen at home and I met his younger brother whose appraisal took a piece of earth from underneath my feet. News was- he had to rush to AIIMS-Delhi for the treatment of his 11 months old son. I was like- what could have happened in past 2-3 weeks which warranted such an urgent move to a place like AIIMS. Bhubaneswar is certainly not a remote village devoid of decent healthcare facilities. The kid had a problem in one of his kidneys. Kidney problem for a 11 months old boy? Called my friend at once and he was not to be reached. So called up a common friend of ours in Delhi who gave me a brief idea about things. The kid had this problem since birth. There was a tiny hole in one of the kidneys, which had grown huge for his size by now. Knowing very little myself, I just had to include the baby in my prayer. My friend narrated the entire story. My natural question was well, that could have been addressed by the docs here. We do have some decent hospitals here in bbsr. I was told, the kid was attended to by best ones available here in the city and they had offered to remove the damaged (as they said) kidney. Thinking about such a thing still gives me a massive shivering down my spine. Now my friend had to stay put in Delhi for few weeks and then got back to bbsr just to go back to AIIMS in another month’s time. And, this time it was for the real treatment. After initial assessments, the kid’s ailing kidney was put under observation for about a month. I just could not believe my ears when my friend told me that abt one and a half litres of liquid (called it water) was to be pumped out of the ailing kidney. The local docs here called it ‘something that may have happened due to some gastric problems and hence not so serious.’ Few days ago, the kid underwent something I forgot what they call in medical terminology. Now there is a pipe planted in the kid’s body which connect the kidney with the urinary tract so that the recuperating kidney does not have to take any load and it gets healed up and compressed back to the near-normal size. My friend has been asked to report back in another month’s time and the docs may remove that pipe and help the kidney further. Well, I asked him again, cannot this step even be done here bbsr?. Mind you, my friend has been squeezing his life-long saving all these while. And then he quoted the doc from AIIMS- doc folks in Orissa are nothing better than ‘gadhas’. It does not give me any pleasure saying this here. But I repeat the term that was used. Something that the local docs should have diagnosed when the kid was reported to them with a swollen stomach when he was about 4 months old and he was being periodically checked for the same ever since. The doc apparently went on to say, on a lighter note, and I quote- ‘I don’t even know if they take out some other thing from the kid’s body instead of the pipe that’s been inserted. We cannot simply leave the kid’s fate to some illiterate docs’...Felt like banging my head in shame!!!