There was an incident during my first year of residency…
A woman walked into the OPD, tears still wet on her cheeks.
Her husband shrugged and said,
“Doctor, bas calcium de dijiye. Kuch nahi hua hai.”
(Just give her calcium, nothing is wrong.)
Before I could respond, her mother-in-law leaned in and added,
“Isko koi problem nahi. Kaam nahi karna chahti, isliye natak kar rahi hai.”
(She’s fine, she just doesn’t want to work, she’s acting.)
And there she sat… silent, exhausted, clutching her abdomen as if her body was begging for someone to believe her.
The family kept talking over her.
“Give something cheap.”
“She’s overthinking.”
“She wants attention.”
But her eyes told a different story.
I put the BP cuff on her arm.
It read 80/50.
Her pulse was racing.
Her skin was cold.
Her breathing shallow.
Not “calcium deficiency.”
Not “acting.”
Something was very wrong.
I ordered a quick hemoglobin.
While the family rolled their eyes, muttering,
“Doctor is just overdoing it.”
Ten minutes later the lab tech rushed back:
Hb: 4.2 g/dL
The room went silent.
I looked at the family and said calmly:
“She’s not acting. She’s crashing.”
“She needs urgent stabilisation, not calcium.”
Within minutes she was shifted to casualty.
IV lines in.
Transfusion arranged.
Broad-spectrum antibiotics.
Emergency ultrasound.
Diagnosis:
Severe anaemia + early septic shock.
The kind of combination that kills quietly.....especially when everyone around the patient refuses to listen.
Her husband stood frozen.
Her mother-in-law stared at the floor.
And she… she looked at me with a mixture of fear and relief, as if someone had finally seen her pain.
That day I learned something residency never warned me about:
Sometimes the biggest barrier to diagnosis isn’t lack of tests…
It’s the people who insist “nothing is wrong.”
And sometimes the most important thing a doctor can do is this:
Believe the patient even when nobody else does.
Have you ever invited your doctor to your house parties or sent them gifts on festivals? No?
But when you are even having a random sneeze, you call them up and expect vip treatment and that too for free.
What audacity.
Why do we live in two Indias? One where a single tragic loss shakes the nation, and another where lives lost daily in the pursuit of saving others are dismissed like background noise?
#MedTwitter#JusticeForRGKar
This is the India we need to worry about. The India that forgets its healers. The India that asks doctors to do more with less, then punishes them when they fail to keep up. The India where one life is worth saving, and the other is not even worth mentioning.
#MedX#MedTwitter
Feeling lost !
“She didn’t get justice and the Doctors didn’t get Central protection act”
That too when the whole nation was protesting
May god bless my Nation 🙏🏼