One random morning, sitting in our old home kitchen, my mother was cutting vegetables, and I was trying to find some water to drink, and my dad was making breakfast. It was just another ordinary morning, until my dad, almost very casually, asked, “Can we go see a doctor today?”
“Sure,” I said, “but for who?”
My mother then told me that apparently my dad had felt some chest pain during morning walk. I remember going completely haywire in my head, especially because of how casually they were talking about it. They were still standing in the kitchen, making breakfast and carrying on with their morning, while I was wondering how they could possibly be so calm about something like chest pain.
I took a moment to soak in what they had just told me and then said, “Yes, let’s go see the doctor.” At that time, I was doing medicine from the same hospital, so I asked them to come there and to call me once they reached. I had spoken to a doctor whom I knew, and I had informed him that I would be bringing my father in.
Once they reached, I went to meet the doctor with my dad. He examined him and advised an ECG and some blood tests. The ECG was not particularly alarming, and initially, everything seemed quite normal. But my dad’s symptoms were still quite classical, and the doctor wasn’t completely convinced that there was something more to it, so we waited for the blood reports.
It was during that consultation that my dad casually mentioned something else – that he had recently started on medication for diabetes. I remember thinking, “Since when?” something I was hearing only then. Typical of my dad, to mention another important piece of information only in front of a doctor, and I was the one looking like an idiot, soon to be doctor, not knowing my own dad’s medical history.
The blood reports eventually showed that he had in fact had a cardiac event. Further evaluation showed blockage in his coronary arteries, and what had started as a very ordinary morning had suddenly become a completely different day.
As everything started happening — the tests, consultations, discussions about the angiography, the blockage and what needed to be done next — I was, of course, thinking about my father as a daughter. But somewhere in between all of that, another thought came.
We had simply decided to see a doctor.
We didn’t have to wait for an appointment for the next few weeks. We didn’t have to first figure out where the nearest specialist was. We didn’t have to think too much about whether this was serious enough to warrant going to a hospital. We felt something was wrong, and we went.
And that day made me realise how much of this I had probably taken for granted.
As doctors, we spend so much time talking about what our healthcare system needs to improve, and rightly so. India still has a very long way to go. The difference in healthcare between cities and villages is enormous. We need stronger primary healthcare, better infrastructure, better specialist and superspecialist care outside major cities, and much more equitable access to quality healthcare. Where someone lives should not determine the kind of healthcare they receive.
At the same time, I have also heard very different stories from friends and relatives living abroad. There have been times when people have called me for something as simple as a fever, a sore throat or a cough. Not necessarily because they don’t have good doctors there, but because getting an appointment can sometimes mean waiting days or even weeks.
Of course, India has its own challenges when it comes to affordability too. Being able to walk into a hospital doesn’t mean that everything that follows is affordable. Outpatient consultations, medicines and investigations can still be a burden, and insurance does not cover every aspect of healthcare for everyone. In our case, my father’s hospital bill eventually ran into few lakhs. We were fortunate to have insurance that helped cover it, and that made me think about how different the same situation could feel for a family without that financial cushion.
So, no, I don’t think India has a perfect healthcare system. We have a lot to learn, a lot to improve and a lot more to do, especially when it comes to taking good quality healthcare beyond large cities and making specialist care accessible to people living in smaller towns and villages.
But I also think there are some things we are fortunate to have; we have become so used to them that we don’t stop to notice.
If you feel something is wrong, you can walk into a hospital. You can see a doctor, get an ECG, have your blood tested, meet a specialist and above. You still have to pay for it, you have to wait, and the quality may not be the same everywhere, but the possibility of seeking care without having planned it weeks in advance is something I have come to appreciate differently after that morning.
And perhaps that is what I thought, every time I took my mother or my dad for heart related issues, and is what I wanted to think about this Independence Day.
We usually speak about independence as the freedom to make our own choices, to travel, to work, to speak, to live the life we want. But perhaps there is another kind of freedom we don’t talk about as much — the freedom to say, “Something doesn’t feel right, I need help,” and there it is at our reach.
I think it is worth pausing, especially on a day when we are thinking about what freedom means to us, and appreciating the things that are already within our reach and utilising it to fullest.
Sometimes, we may not realise how fortunate we are until life gives us a reason to notice.
And that morning, it did.