It was today, thirty eight years ago ! The sound of a gunshot is more like a loud cracker than a resounding boom one hears in the movies. And barring Rajinikant no one can escape a 158 gram bullet fired from a .38 caliber revolver and heading towards you at 755 feet per second. In any case I was sitting on a bike and there wasn’t a chance in hell that I could adjust my position by even an inch. The slug entered my left flank, tore through my intestines and made a neat exit from the right. The bike fell and I slumped on the concrete pavement. A few more gunshots flew in the air and a lot of expletive laden shouts followed. Surprisingly there was no pain at first. The bullet felt like a sting and since it had not hit any bone there wasn’t a great impact either. I touched my side and saw my new blue shirt darkening with blood stains. I tried to get up but fell down instantly. The violence around me was over in five minutes. Two of my friends came and took me to the hospital, me again sitting on the bike sandwiched between them.
The trauma ward of a hospital is a little like a busy railway station and the one at PGI was among the biggest and busiest of them all. It caters to five neighboring states and unlike the referral institution it was envisaged to be it has willy nilly acquired the character of a big civil hospital with ever burgeoning OPDs and overcrowded wards. The trauma centre is a round the clock mad house teeming with hundreds of failed hearts, broken limbs and dysfunctional organs. Each agonized entrant deems his problem as the severest in the world and wants the doctors on duty attending to him before anyone else. It’s left to the harried residents, lowest in the hierarchy of the doctors, to quickly assess the severity of the problem and prioritize the order in which medical care needs to be given. If need be, a reference is made to the senior resident who decides the course of immediate treatment and further management. For the most serious ones a call is made to the Consultants. They waltz into the mad house, give a few withering glances to the cowering Residents, decide what to do with the patient who would be mercifully unaware of what is going to happen to his insides within a short while. But all that was for ordinary mortals, not me.
A little background is in order here. Politics has always been and forever will be an integral part of educational institutions until it is banned by law which in a democratic country is unlikely to happen. Hence in our University there were different political outfits which were different not because of their ideologies but because of groups headed by strong headed individuals who would never bow to anyone else. All of us were convinced by our respective affiliations and regarded the others as pretenders and self seekers. Loyalties were fierce and anyone who left the fold was condemned for life as a traitor who would burn in the purgatory for eternity. I was drawn to the university politics from day I took admission in the Law department and found my way to a group which was, at the time, the principal opposition to the ruling group. The measure of political success in the University was the result of the elections to the Students' Council which was the recognized body representing the students in the affairs of the University. The ruling group had been in power for many years and it was in 1980 that they faced some serious opposition. Over the next two years our group made steady progress and then in 1982, thanks to some unavoidable circumstances, it fell upon me to contest the election of General Secretary of the Council. We swept the elections. The victory however came at a cost. Rivalries became more intense, often resulting into avoidable violence which eventually claimed a few lives. There were others, including me, who would be scarred for life. Hence it was a known student leader (so much for modesty) and not an ordinary gunshot victim who was wheeled into the hospital.
On reaching there I was immediately put on a steel stretcher and wheeled in. Gunshot injury received an immediate response from the medical staff. My shirt was taken off and pressure bandages put on both sides of my abdomen to stem the flow of blood which to my surprise was very little. A sweet little nurse came and jammed a few needles in me. I was still on the stretcher and the pain was now beginning to test my resolve. Much to my surprise the pain was emanating from my back rather than my punctured abdomen. I was still waiting for the doctors to come and start doing something when the first of my well wishers started filtering in. Now mind you, the emergency ward is an area where the entry is severely restricted but my intrepid friends and well wishers scoured every nook and corner of the hospital and gained access to the forbidden area. It soon became a security issue for the hospital authorities until they were requested to leave by my close friends.
Another cute nurse came and started to shove a tube up my nose. I muttered...Sister, careful..my nose is very sensitive. Sweetly she chimed..don't worry, everyone's nose is like this only. I had little choice except to surrender. Soon I was wheeled to the operation theatre and I woke up a few hours later in the recovery room. I must have looked like an alien lying on a bed. From behind the oxygen mask I could see a glucose cum medicine drip in my arm apart from the draining tubes, three on each side of my abdomen and a large bandage on my then deflated tummy and of course that horrible Ryle's Tube jutting out of my nose. The recovery room is perhaps least conducive to the well being, mental at least, of any patient. There were groans and cries of pain all around me. Now I was in a lot of pain too, again in my back. I kept wondering what was wrong with it. Mercifully after a while someone came, gave me an intravenous pain killer and I drifted off to sleep. The next few days I kept hovering between different degrees of consciousness. I have faint recollections of hordes of students trying to sneak in a look and being scolded by the security staff. My younger sister and a few close friends kept a round the clock vigil by my side.
About ten days later when it was deemed that I was stable enough I was shifted to a private ward. It was there I learnt the extent of the damage to my insides. Miraculously none of the vital organs were affected but my intestines had suffered considerable damage which was taken care of by the surgeons. The doctors insisted that I walk around a bit to avoid accumulation of gas inside but the moment I took a few steps I would be racked by a severe pain and would collapse in the arms of my attendants. The next two weeks were sheer torture. I kept complaining of pain and the surgeons kept ignoring me thinking that being a VIP patient (in their opinion) I was just being difficult. I would go into spasms of pain and apart from the routine pain killers there was no other relief. Redemption came in the form of a friend who was doing his masters in orthopedics but had been on leave all this while. He examined me and found that something was wrong with my vertebrae. A call was sent to the ortho guys and I was finally relieved of the pain thanks to some skillful manipulation of the spine by an expert.
I spent three months in the hospital with a small interval between the two stays and another operation to kind of wind up what had been done in the first one (I'll spare you the gory details). What has stayed with me all the succeeding years is not the pain and the discomfort that I suffered but redeeming qualities of individuals who stood with me in the time of my crisis. My younger sis was there 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout my incarceration. As were some close friends, all of whom took turns to ensure that I was never without a loved one by my side. So many of others came so frequently that I was constantly scolded by the doctors and nurses on the risk of infection but who was listening ! And then there were the "High Spirits", a group of four young ladies who were so christened so because the in house mafia that I was constantly surrounded with concluded that my otherwise low spirits took a northward leap every time they came into my room, high heels making the appropriate sounds of their arrival
They were always a delight to be with. And of course another dear friend who came everyday and brought a different greeting card with her. I still have all of them.Just before I was wheeled into the operation theatre I had asked my sister to send a telegram to Chammak Challo who was still in medical college. She wrote a letter instead which CC received two weeks later. The contents were enough to make CC board a train immediately and reach Chandigarh. She did not know in which ward/room I was in but still managed to find out, walk past the security and barge into the room where I was writhing in pain. It was for the first time my father came to know that I too had someone in my life and the moment he came to know that she was a doctor to be, he made up his mind that this was the daughter in law he wanted. And we had still not made any kind of commitment to each other yet.
There is this friend of mine from the University days (aren't they all from that era?) who has been wishing me a "Happy Birthday" every year on the 3rd September. It's a reminder of the benevolence of God who steered me away just a few inches from death and granted me a second shot at life. It also reminds me to count my blessings which came in form of friends and family who cared and continue to do so till date.
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