Punjab Institute of Cardiology by Prof Zak

The critters slowly crawled up his skin gnawing at the pores of his body. In an instant his fragile body was inundated by an army of those blood-sucking jeepers. In a frenzied state of panic he jumped through the glass window only to find himself having landed in a pool of quicksand. Helplessly he felt the earth disappear from underneath his feet as his legs gave up the fight for a pounce. Disparagingly he resigned himself to his fate and finally let go. The critters now at his nostrils, leeching their way into his central nervous system and a whirlwind of the quagmire beneath his feet he submitted himself to the end that was scribed for him. He was not even crying for help any more. Just as his head was about to get submerged into the abyss, he woke up with a start, sweating profusely from this horrific nightmare even as he jumped out of bed and started to circumambulate the room in a hurry just to get some feeling back in his spine. Yet another sleepless night. A stark reminder of the tragedy he had lived. A trauma he had survived - the sudden death of his beloved father.

The passing away of that honorable man had left them all in shambles but there is more to this story than has been shared hitherto. The night of Sat Aug 8, 2015 - a ruthless, unsparing, bitter night. He was pleasurably having tea on his father's couch as his father lay on the ground in front of him as was customary of the old geyser to pass away into much needed sleep. The old fella was in a habit of waking up at odd hours of the night to pray and submit to his Lord, the one God and 10:30pm was his bedtime. A time when he peacefully snored away the entire load of the day's chores. A tireless equestrian, this old man. But, tonight was different. At the stroke of 10:30pm, the old man sat up and beckoned to his tea-sipping son making a gesture pointing towards his upper abdomen on the left side of his body indicating that he was in extreme discomfort and feebly muttered the words, "Take me to the hospital". Dumfounded, his son dropped the tea-mug and stood straight up recognizing the omen in the occurrence. Meekly he questioned, "Which one? Iqra?” The old man swayed his head in disagreement and uttered back, “No, the big hospital". The son knew where this was leading. No more questions being needed, he urged his wife to hurry herself up, get the keys to the house, and together they rushed towards the Punjab Institute of Cardiology (the big hospital), supposedly the center of cardiac care for the biggest province of a densely populated country, a hospital that sees an average of more than a 100 patients a day.

One would think that the medical care and the facilities would be exemplary, avant-garde, state-of-the-art to say the least but alas. The entire ordeal was painfully marauding, on the hospital's part of course. Things were doomed from the get-go. First, the old man started to gasp for breath on the way to that abattoir, for lack of a more appropriate adjective. Then, parking was a challenge something akin to climbing the tallest mountain peak in the world. Once, that was done and dealt with, the care that was expunged upon the man was speciously questionable to say the least. The doctor monitoring that ICU was a ruthless shaman. The attending physician administered a shot of some cryptic potion to that hapless old man experiencing a severe cardiac arrest which moments later knocked him out into a state of limbo. The four pills that he was forced to intake didn’t help the cause either. The ICU where he was rushed reeked of blood-stained rags, chlorine, a mix of body-odor and formaldehyde adding to the repulsion of finding ourselves in that quandary.

Ultimately, when that attending doctor had won the battle of wits over me he forced my unconscious father to be pushed back into the main ICU ward behind the critical unit on a wheelchair with his head bobbing around like he was a golliwog in a state of trance. All I needed to see was the sight of a ginormous gecko hopping around from one pulse monitor to another to realize that the patient hacking his lungs out in the corner into a waste basket was just another additive to the pungent portrait of an abysmal medical facility, and I started to regret having rushed my father there with every inch of my conscience. The next day came about with his health not getting any better and him still in a state of delusion. The ignorant medical staff having injected blood thinner into his body for more than 16 hours by then, and his pulse not picking up to a normal reading they decided in their innate medical wisdom that perhaps the old man was a recovering drug addict and we were hiding his addiction from them. All it took was for one of the female doctors to ask me the question if my father was a drug junkie that I broke down into tears.

I lamented the fact that I was in Pakistan, I detested the fact that I had rushed him to a government hospital, I decried the reality that our healthcare infrastructure, it's layout, its setup, its entire fabric is in want of a major humanitarian overhaul, not to mention my slowly transgressing father. That is when it slowly started to sink into my rationale that maybe I was slowly losing my father to the parallel world and I was stuck at a cul de sac with no exit. I had lost to a poor, weak, lambastable system that had overpowered me like the rest of the millions who fall victim to this absurd excuse for a hospital. By Monday Aug 10, 2015, which was the day of his demise, I had observed 8 deaths within a span of 48 hours and my father had never come around to being his normal self until 30 minutes before his death.

That's when the ignorant Medical Director suggested that his pulse had picked up and there wasn't a need for the external pacemaker to be attached to his neck anymore and he had survived a critical heart attack - which, just 24 hours ago their entire staff had kept vehemently denying as a minor possibility and they kept trying to pin his condition on to his diabetes. They had literally tried everything they could apart from directly refusing us medical care, for us to take my unconscious old man somewhere else on account of the fact that they had failed to even symptomize his condition as a cardiac condition neither had they been able to diagnose his liver cirrhosis which perhaps was causing him the disorientation. No sooner had they removed the pacemaker that my father sat up and for some inexplicable miraculous reason started to act and talk as normal.

That was just a false mirage, for exactly 30 minutes later while talking to my wife he turned his head around quietly, looked upwards, took a couple deep disjointed breaths, and she saw his eyes roll inwards and he collapsed on the bed of that sorry excuse for a medical care facility. A few minutes later, I found myself signing the hardest document that I've ever had to sign - his death certificate. That drive back home in the ambulance-for-hire with his limp corpse in the back has to be the longest journey of my life. I can easily tell you that I wailed my guts out the whole way home and losing that thorough gentleman was a life-changing experience on many fronts, but one thing’s for sure; I'm never suggesting even my worst enemy to rush to the PIC (Punjab Institute of Cardiology) lest the time should come.

-This is copyright of Prof Zak