In yet another case of medical apathy, a man was forced to carry his 15-year-old dead son on his shoulders in Etawah district of Uttar Pradesh, as the government hospital doctors refused to provide any kind of help to him.
"My son had a pain in his legs. The doctors spared only a few minutes for my child and said, ‘take him away, there is no life in the boy’," a weeping 45-year-old Udayveer told reporters on Tuesday.
"No one told me that I was entitled to an ambulance to take my son's body back," he added.
On its part, the hospital has said that the matter will be investigated and action taken. "I am told that the body of the son was brought dead and the doctors were busy with an accident case and so they could not ask him [Udayveer] if he needed transport. There will be action... it is no doubt a blot on the reputation of this hospital," the chief medical officer at Etawah said.
The incident brought back the memories of the shocking case of Odisha where a farmer named Majhi walked with his wife’s body because there was no hearse available at the hospital. His young daughter, tears streaming down her face, had walked with him. That was in August last year and there appears to be no concrete attempts to address such cases or sensitize the existing medical apparatus on the better handling of such cases.
A similar incident happened in Bengaluru on May 1, where a three-year-old boy was declared “brought dead” at a government hospital following which his father had to carry his son’s body home on a two-wheeler. The boy was knocked down by a vehicle on Sunday.
The hospital, however, denied any “insensitivity” on its part. It said the parents of the boy had taken the body without the mandatory autopsy.
