Aarti laughs wryly. Shibani continues,
“We asked to take her out of intensive care, which was so expensive, so they put her in a normal ward where we could spend time with her. But she had reached a terrible state. She had bedsores and she was continually crying. All she would say was, ‘Take me out of here!’
“We asked the doctors what we should do. They said, ‘She is not eating. We need to put a hole in her stomach so we can feed her through it.’ While we were discussing this with them, a nurse came in to tell us that Amit’s mother had passed away.”
Tears begin to pour down Amit’s face as Shibani recalls this moment.
She says, “And you know what the doctor said to us? He said, ‘Perhaps if we put her back into intensive care and put her on a ventilator, she’ll revive. We can try that.’ So I said, ‘On one condition. I want to stay with her the whole time and watch what you do.’ And the doctor said, ‘Families are not allowed into the intensive care unit.’ So we said, ‘Then we won’t do it.’ And he said, ‘Of course, if you don’t want your mother to live, then… I mean there is a 1 per cent chance that she will live — who are you to decide that she should not survive? But if you don’t have money… ’
“But we were done. It was over. We told the doctor, and he left us.
“We went in to see Amit’s mother. Immediately someone came to collect the outstanding money. They talked to us across her dead body. ‘You have 2 lakhs [$4,000] outstanding. Please pay.’ They had no respect. They talked over her body. In India we respect the dead, you know? They were so rude.”
Amit intervenes. “When we cremated my mother, the priest told me her bones had turned to powder.”
Shibani is fiery with the rage all these memories have aroused.
“People are dying for no reason,” she says. “At least we have a little money. We met people who were kicked out of the hospital when their insurance money was used up, and the doctors hardly bothered to sew them up. Of course, people who have no money at all don’t have a chance.”
“These hospitals are totally corrupt,” says Aarti. “Patients are only profit. Nothing else. Anything they can’t understand they call cancer because then they can pump you with the most expensive medicines. This religious, spiritual country — the humanity is going out of it. Very little good is being done but a lot of harm is being done.”
“What happened to your husband?” I ask her.
“He died here too. Just before Amit’s mother. He was a very good man. We had forty-three years of beautiful companionship. These days very few people can say that. I was married to a man who never stopped thinking about me and looking out for me.”
I realise Aarti must be older than she looks.
“He came from a well-known family. There were famous journalists and academics in the family, and film stars. He had a successful career and we moved in good circles. Anybody who’s anybody in Delhi, I know them.”
Aarti has to take a minute to establish her class position. Her story has additional weight because she is someone.
“My side of the family is well-known too,” she says. “Both my grandfathers were titled. My father’s father was from Jalandhar. He became chief engineer of the railways: he was knighted and received an OBE. They were a famous Delhi family who used to be very close to Indira Gandhi. My mother’s family came from Lahore — they lost everything in 1947 and came over to stay in Delhi. My grandfather did very well in business and acquired a grand mansion in the diplomatic enclave.”
She is so Delhi. It drives me crazy.
“My husband was never sick. He was 6’1” and strapping. He never wore glasses. He never went to a dentist in his life and his teeth were all his own. When he was seventy years old he used to thrash thirty-five-year-olds on the badminton court. He never took a rest in the afternoon. During the forty-three years we were married, apart from a few colds and a back injury, I don’t remember him ever being ill.
“In October 2009 everything went wrong. On 4 November he went into hospital and by 5 February of the following year, he was gone.
“The problem was never diagnosed, though I sent his tests to dozens of doctors. It started with a viral fever and then he became very weak. A low-grade fever continued for some time. A multitude of tests were done. We were sent to see endocrinologists who gave him expensive drugs. At first those drugs put him in a cold sweat and then they gave him a stroke.
“You see, he never took medication in his life. If he had to take an aspirin he used to cut it in half. He couldn’t take so much medicine. They started pumping antibiotics into his system four times a day just because it cost 5,000 rupees [$100] a time. I said, ‘What are you doing? You are only thinking about drugs and money, but I love him and I can see what it’s doing to him.’
“They started chemotherapy without a diagnosis! They had no idea what was wrong with him. The doctors were so well-known, I felt I had to do what they said. But each time I listened to the doctor, my husband got worse. And it was only when I didn’t listen that he got any better.
“I took him out of that hospital and went to another. I went with all his test results but they wanted to test everything again — there was incredible over-testing. They said they wanted to do a biopsy of his lymph nodes, which had become swollen with all the medication. It would be a simple procedure with a local anaesthetic.
“The night before it was supposed to happen I was sleeping in his hospital room when I suddenly woke up. It was dark, it must have been one in the morning, and I saw there was a beautiful nurse standing in the room. If you saw her you would say, ‘What a beautiful woman!’ So I opened my eyes and saw this extremely beautiful woman standing by my husband’s bed. She had brought a form for him to sign, authorising the hospital to do a much more expensive procedure under general anaesthetic. Can you imagine? My husband was almost delirious with the drugs, and he would have woken up in the middle of the night to see this angel in his room asking him to sign a piece of paper? I told her to leave, that this wasn’t what the doctor had told us, and I took my husband out of that hospital the next morning.”
The combination of high costs and low information that characterises this system is an insidious one, and leads to a paranoid panic which only makes things worse. Patients consult twenty doctors because they trust none of them. They abort therapies and change hospitals, with the result that there is no sustained treatment.
“When we arrived in the next hospital, my husband began to recover. They gave less medication. His platelet levels had dipped to 45,000 per microlitre before we came there — they are supposed to be above 150,000 — but they began to rise again. After a few days, he was ready to leave hospital. But they decided they had to get more revenue out of him, and they faked his blood test result.
“He was ready to leave: he was putting on his scarf. He hated being in hospital and was very happy to be leaving. Usually, the blood tests came up automatically on the monitor in his room. On that morning they did not. He was getting his coat on but we couldn’t leave before the test results arrived. There was no reason to worry — his platelet count had risen from 45,000 to 90,000 while he had been in that hospital.
“I went to ask why the results had not come. No one could tell me. The doctor said, ‘Let me call the lab myself.’ He looked at me and without listening to anything on the other end he told me that my husband’s platelet count had fallen to 43,000 and that he needed an emergency transfusion.