The COVID Ward

When I was eleven, I used to go to my dad`s OPD and wear his stethoscope and oversized apron. I used to sit on his chair which felt like a throne. I used to scribble in intentionally bad handwriting on his writing pad and sign, Dr. Dhruvi. In his lunch breaks, I would ask him to pretend to be a patient and make up names of medicines. 

Every day, he used to come home and tell me ‘hospital stories’. It was our daily routine. He told me about all the machines and it all felt like magic. As a little kid, I would be fascinated how a balloon inserted into a lung could help someone breathe; how giving currents would make one`s heart start beating again like some miracle. He used to make up funny endings and we would giggle. He would teach me big words like neurocysticercosis which for an eleven-year-old kid, felt like some rocket science. 

Yesterday, out of curiosity, I asked him to join him for his rounds in the Covid ward. I went with him and stood behind him as he examined every patient and asked the nurse to update their conditions. I stood beside him as he quickly turned pages of patients` files and glanced as I tried to correlate few of the many terms that I had read in my textbooks. As he held up the scans, I felt like that eleven-year-old self who didn’t understand a thing but was fascinated by what she saw. 

He went into the ICU and I followed him. Those newspaper headlines and Covid statistics we read do negligible justice to what I saw that day. He went on with his rounds while I stood in one place. The machines beeped and hissed, constantly reminding about the war we are at right now. 

I saw an old lady who was on non-invasive ventilator. I looked at the pink tiffin bag that was kept under the table on the left side of her bed. It had flowers printed on it and a picture of Hello Kitty. May be it was her granddaughter`s, who was waiting at her home for her grandma. May be there was an incomplete bedtime story that her grandma told her. May be that little girl was waiting to know the story`s ending, thinking, ‘When would my grandma come home.’ 

There was an old man. His hair had turned silver and he was wearing a dusty shirt. I noticed a touch screen phone by his side which still had the plastic on it. May be his son gave that phone to him as a birthday gift. He must have taught him how to use it. He would have been so amazed when he came to know that we can actually talk and see a person living miles away from us. ‘We didn’t have any such thing in our times,’ he must have said, as he his shaky hands would struggle to type messages and his eyes would sparkle with astonishment. 

There was a young woman. I saw her nails painted, all of them in different colours. The nail polish was smudged on her fingertips. May be it was her daughter who had painted her nails. She would have insisted on painting her mom`s nails and persisted her to keep it no matter how mismatched and weird they looked. And she would have loved it too, after all, every mother sees their kid`s art as Picasso`s masterpiece. 

Those beeping monitors, thick files and stacks of medicines didn’t catch my attention as much as that pink tiffin bag, that touch screen phone and those bizarrely painted nails did. These stories, never made it to the headlines. If they died, they would just end up being a number. During the pandemic, more than four thousand people died from Covid-19 in India in a day. That means, more than four thousand families were broken. More than four thousand incomplete goodbyes. More than four thousand unfinished stories.

If you`re able to breathe without a machine, it is the greatest blessing in the world. If you`re able to sit with your family at the dinner table and have dinner together, it is the greatest blessing. Let`s take a minute to be grateful. Let`s take a minute and pray for everyone and everything to heal.

-Dhruvi Joshi