On my terms

Last Tuesday, during the early hours in the morning Dad suffered a mild heart attack. When he got off from his bed to start his day, he suddenly fell down and just didnt get up. Everyone at home panicked and we rushed him to the nearest big hospital called Paras Hospital in Sushant Lok, Gurgaon. This turned out to be the biggest mistake we could make.

They admitted him in the ICU and started with their proceedings. We were asked to wait in the waiting lounge. A couple of hours went by without even a single feedback from the concerned doctor. Mom was getting restless. A billion thoughts were going through my own mind. So I got up and tried to find the doctor. After a lot of running around from one corridor to another, I could get hold of Dr. Rajeev Kumar Errie. He was the on e looking after our case. Very nice and soft spoken gentleman that he is, he told us that everything is normal and we should not worry. It was a mild attack and the patient should be fine with one day under observation in the ICU. They carried out the usual heart attack treatments and tests like the blood dilution process (do not know its medical name), ECGs, ECO, etc. The entire day I kept sitting in the waiting lounge with my mom in the hope of hearing something back from the hospital guys. Everytime I went and asked them about the status, either I could not get through to the people who would know, or they would simply return me telling that they are still doing the tests that they were doing the last time around.

After controlling my frustration all day long, I completely lost my temper in the evening. Good that I did. A little embarassed with the scene that I was creating, the receptionist made a call to the doctor on his mobile and made me speak to him. Apparantly this gentleman had left without even feeling the need of informing us on the status of my father. Well you cant do much, you certainly cant shout on a doctor who is treating your dad in such a situation and when you are no more than an illiterate when it comes to medical things. He told me that things look normal, and we should be able to shift him to the room tomorrow morning. We were quite happy and relieved. This one statement from him was enough to throw away all the frustration and anger.

Next day, the shifting which was supposed to happen at 9am in the morning finally happened at 3pm in the noon. After coming to the room, dad’s condition worsened. He started vomiting and was having difficulty in breathing. I went running for the doctor again. He came to see him but could not figure out what was happening. He said he needs rest, and left.

After some time, Dad started shivering badly. I called up the nurses. They took his temperature which turned out to be 95F. On some cross questioning on why is his temperature dropping, they told me that the attendants in the ICU had by mistake reduced the temperature of the ICU a lot in the morning because of which he seemed to have developed hypothermia. I just could not believe at the state of affairs going on in this supposedly five star facility. As his condition further worsened, doctor suggested us to shift him back to the ICU. Looking at his condition I hardly had a choice. Perhaps I should have taken the decision of taking him to some other hospital right then.

Dad had another heart attack one hour after he was admitted to ICU. When I got to know about this, I went numb. Though it didnt take me a second to stand up and start running but internally I was simply numb. Just the feeling that all this happened in front of me and I let this happen to him.

Doctor told us that he is not very confident about him and we should take him to another hospital. We dialled to all friends and relatives to collect opinion on where to go, and decided on Fortis Hospital, Vasant Kunj. The experience with Fortis was good right from the beginning. On recieving our call, they immediately sent a cardiac ambulance with a cardiologist to take care of the patient during transit. At 10:30 in the night, Dad got admitted into the Fortis CCU. Even before they could gauge the situation, Dad had a very severe attack. They informed us that Dad can not wait till morning and they are going to do the angiography right now. By 3 in the night, the results of angiography were out. Two arteries were badly clogged at five places. In the morning, after a lot of discussion among the panel of doctors they decided to perform a by pass surgery on him. With in two hours, the surgery was started. By god’s grace, since then everything has gone very well.

Four days have passed but I am yet to get over the sequence of events that happened. Today dad has been shifted to a comfortable room from the ICU. He is sleeping right here in front of me while I am writing this post.

The reason I am writing this is because I do not want anyone else to make the same mistakes that I did and put the life of his loved ones at stake. I was lucky to get away with the mistakes/misjudgements that I made. Its not usual to be fine after having three attacks in two days. If you are in NCR (Delhi-Noida-Gurgaon-Faridabad), in case of a heart problem straight away rush to speciality heart centres like Escorts, Fortis & Batra, even if that might be causing some delay. How you react in the first 24-48 hours will decide the fate of your patient.

Never ever land up in Paras Hospital, Gurgaon. Bad doctors, arrogant staff.
My full recommendations for Fortis Hospital, Vasant Kunj. Great doctors and very cooperating staff.