“Dad, what should we do? We have a corpse in our house.”
My father was startled by the opening lines of my unscheduled whatsapp call. How on earth did I end up with a dead body in my room?
Rewind the clock three days, and it was a warm Saturday morning as I took a neighbour with a chronic liver issue to our local government hospital to get some abdominal swelling checked out. On our way in, I couldn’t help but notice a dishevelled man lying on the footpath just outside the emergency room. I ignored him, assuming that someone else would be looking out for him. But after half an hour of waiting to see the doctor, I walked that way again and saw that he was still in the same position; still alone.
I asked one of the guards about him; he said he had not much idea but had called the authorities. Then I sat down to ask the man himself.
“What’s your name?”
“Pradeep” he whispered croakily. I looked down at his right foot, which was horrifically maggot-infested. His flesh had been eaten away, toe bones were visible. Then I noticed his head – a large wound on the top revealed his skull bone; maggots were also crawling around there. The man was filthy enough himself, but his wounds could be smelt 10 metres away.
“Where are you from? Where is your family?” I gently asked
“I don’t have a family. I live on the road.” Talking was clearly a struggle for him.
“How long have you been here?”
“A couple days.” His sense of time may have been distorted, as later one of the guards claimed that he wasn’t there last night.
“Shall I get you bandaged up?”
“Yes”
I went and waited in line, while calculating… how much responsibility can I take for him? What are my other options? I got to the desk, gave his name, invented an address, dictated my phone number. “What’s the issue?” the staff-person asked. “Well, he has a nasty maggot-infested wound on his foot and his head, hasn’t eaten for days, and is very weak.” Minutes later I got the registration slip and saw that they had just scrawled ‘maggots’ over the page. Can’t fault her for lack of brevity!
Soon after I had done the paperwork, a police officer turned up, having been informed of the situation by a guard. He called out gruffly to me – who are you? I explained that I was a social worker, and while I didn’t know this man, I wanted to ensure that he got some good care in hospital. The police officer took down my details and then tried to get an address out of the man. He had little success. Pradeep was barely audible at a distance of 1 metre, and that was far closer than the officer was willing to get!
Shortly afterwards, I was able to get a Covid test done for him and have him transferred onto a bed in the holding area. At the doctor’s suggestion, I bought some turpentine and got him cleaned and bandaged. By this stage, I was very late for my team meeting, so headed off to that, after getting an assurance from one of the hospital authorities that he would assign a ward boy to look out for the man.
I visited again on Sunday, and then, late on Monday, got a call from the hospital: “your patient has tested negative for Covid”. With the help of a ward boy, I transferred Pradeep up to the surgery department. After another lengthy wait, a junior doctor ordered me to go out and buy two pairs of gloves (we normally get enough, but the Covid ward has been taking the lion’s share, he explained). Then he told me to take Pradeep into the OT.
Once I got Pradeep into the OT, I headed for the door. “Where are you going?” the surgeon asked amusedly, handing me back one of the pairs of gloves. “I need you here to hold him.” Fighting the urge to vomit, I held Pradeep’s leg at a conducive angle while the doctor poured turpentine over it and watched the maggots squirm – some dropping out, others burrowing deeper into the flesh. After a few minutes of trying to remove maggots, the doctor bandaged the up the foot and stripped off his gloves. Then, as he was cleaning up the maggots, he exclaimed: “Oh darn, I forgot the head wound.”
After a moment’s silence, he looked at my gloved hands. “You can do it, right? It’s not difficult.” Now it was my turn to pour turpentine and try to remove as many maggots as I could, without enlarging the wound. By now my nausea had settled and it felt somewhat satisfying – in a perverse sort of way – to pull the critters from his scalp.
Bandaged up, we took Pradeep back into the ward, where a senior doctor explained to me: “His foot will require amputation.”
I was not surprised. “Ok, when can you do it?” I asked.
“Not now. First you need to take him home and get the maggots under control, otherwise it may infect the stump.”
I was a bit confused by this medical reasoning, but obviously the doctor knew far more than me. So I decided to argue about something else.
“How can I take him home? He doesn’t have a home, he lives on the street.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s not our problem. We have strict orders to only admit those who are ready for surgery, and this patient isn’t. Where you take him is none of our business.”
After a couple more pleas, each futile, I decided to take him back to the holding area. The doctor there told me in no uncertain terms: “this is a one way track – we don’t take any patients back after referring them to the specialists.”
Growing frustrated, I asked him: “But you must have this sort of situation all the time! What do you do with other homeless people who have been abandoned here?”
The doctor chuckled sadly. “We treat them like a football. I kick them over to that department. Then that department kicks them over there. We keep transferring them around, and then eventually they either run away – or they die.”
By now it was past 11pm, and I had run out of options. I decided to take Pradeep back to my place. Soon afterwards, I shook my room-mate Rajesh awake and got his help to carry Pradeep up to our room on the first floor. Exhausted, we all fell asleep in minutes.
The next morning was a difficult one. Rajesh left early for another commitment. I waited with Pradeep, and offered him water and food. He rejected that, instead begging for alcohol. When I refused him, he became impatient and frustrated with me, even violent. I started doing internet research and calling up friends, trying to find a place where Pradeep could stay long term after his foot was amputated.
By the time Rajesh returned, I had dug up a few leads, so rode off first to the Sisters of Charity. I was rebuffed at the gate by a guard, who told me that they were not taking anyone new due to the Covid pandemic. I explained that he had already tested negative, but the guard was having none of it. I asked to talk to one of the sisters, but he refused to let me in – after all, I might be positive! Conceding the point, I rode off.
Minutes later, I checked my phone to see that Rajesh had called four times. I called him back and he cut straight to the chase: “Bro, come quickly. Uncle has died.”
The rest of the afternoon was a blur. After calling my parents, I went to inform the police and also the doctors. Fortunately one of my NGO friends was able to arrange a hearse through their network. We took the hearse in as far as it could go down the main lane, and then carried Pradeep’s body out the tiny alleys to the hearse.
The hundred-metre walk home took 20 minutes, as everyone who had seen us wanted to know the story. Almost nobody had seen me bring Pradeep in late last night, and carrying a corpse out is suspicious in the best of times! To my relief, most of the neighbours understood the story and even praised my courage in taking him into our house. One of my friends, herself a widow, consoled me: “You did everything you could, which is all God asks of you. The rest is up to Him.”
Reflecting on the experience brings up a wealth of emotions.
I feel sad that Pradeep had been lying there on the footpath, with hundreds of people just passing by. Yet my experience of the police questioning me, and the hospital requiring a high level of responsibility from me, helped me to understand and empathise why so many people do not respond. And walking Pradeep home late that night, I myself walked past hundreds of others walking on the footpath. I occasionally play the Good Samaritan, but more often I am the Priest or the Levite!
I feel angry that the hospital was not willing to admit Pradeep, despite being in a condition where he died 18 hours later! While it is understandable that resources – from gloves to doctors – have been diverted to the Covid pandemic, this means that the very lives which are already so undervalued, are tossed aside even more casually. Later, even the Sisters of Charity were not prepared to take him – though that turned out to be irrelevant!
I remain full of questions and hypotheticals. What if I had met Pradeep earlier – might I have been able to save his life, perhaps even save his foot? What if I had drawn a much clearer line with the hospital, and refused to take Pradeep home that night? Would they have admitted him and cared for him – or tossed him out on the street? What if I had caved into Pradeep’s request, and given him a bit of alcohol? Might it at least have numbed the pain a bit on what turned out to be his last day?
Through it all, I feel a strange sense of gratitude, too. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to serve Pradeep. Perhaps it was all for nought – after all, I spent a lot of time and emotional energy, but ultimately couldn’t save his life. But I hope that it set a small example – for our neighbours, for the hospital staff, and yes, for myself too – that humanity still matters, that kindness still counts. That, even in the midst of a pandemic, the life of one grotty, maggot-infested, elderly alcoholic is still precious.
Tags:
