My mother is 76.
In mid-April this year, I got covid. By end-April, my mother developed symptoms too. Being elderly, diabetic, obese and hypertensive, this was truly scary.
That was the time when Delhi had run out of hospital beds. With her blood reports and scans all showing bad signs, I started looking for hospital beds. And medicines.
We consulted a doctor online, and he gave us a list of 17 medicines, including steroids, to prevent worsening. I paid ten times the normal price for some medicines, such as Favipiravir, that were said to help with the disease.
About a week after the onset of symptoms, her fever suddenly shot up to 103, and her SPO2 levels started falling. Medicines gave up on the eighth day and her SPO2 fell to 92.
That's when the panic truly set in.
I dialled numbers sent to me by strangers on WhatsApp. SP02 at 88.
When the SP02 was at 87, I had no options any more. I paid 15,000 to a stranger who promised to deliver an oxygen cylinder at home.
The cylinder never came.
I called a private ambulance who demanded ten thousand rupees to take her to the nearest hospital. No promise of beds though.
I called the government ambulance service who promptly agreed to send a vehicle over in ten minutes. The driver finally called me after twenty minutes, but we had already left by then.
With her SP02 at 86, I had helped her down the stairs and driven her to three different hospitals. It was the 4th of May.
People were dying due to lack of oxygen in Delhi's hospitals.
I saw hospitals that said NO BEDS LEFT.
I saw hospitals that said NO OXYGEN LEFT.
I saw bodies being ferried out, fully packed, by staff decked up in PPE suits.
Then, as if by a miracle, an uncle told me to rush to an army Covid facility. They had some beds available. Not for long though.
It was ten kms away. Her SPO2 was 82.
I drove with tears in my eyes.
When we finally reached the facility, her SPO2 was 72 and she was struggling to breathe.
The army staff was very helpful. My mother got a bed. She was given oxygen. Her SPO2 started to rise, gradually.
My mother lay on the hospital bed for 40 days, with no faces to see, just shiny white PPE kits. At 76 years of age, she got punctured with hundreds of syringes, was administered dozens of pills a day, and was barely able to eat food due to weakness and fungal infection in her mouth (which thankfully turned out to be candidiasis, not black fungus). She developed severe paranoia, and would frequently shout out, 'they are going to kill me'.
She was so weak at the end of her hospital stay that she had lost a total of twelve kilos of body weight. She was also unable to walk for two months after discharge.
Last evening, the same woman, my superhero, my mother, arranged earthen diyas, made cotton rolls, poured oil into the diyas and lit fourteen of them.
"It's Diwali. We must light up every lamp," she said.
Happy Diwali.
~ Abhijit
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