Almost a year after the lockdown, New Hope Medical Centre on Chennai's Poonamallee High Road is seeing patients with orthopaedic and neuro issues walking in with fresh hope. When I asked for Dr Pradeep Kumar, the nurse at the patient care centre pointed to a cabin on the ground floor. As I walked in, the orthopaedic surgeon was speaking to an attender: “I will see. Tell him he will recover soon.”
Kumar, 36, is a man of few words, but those are filled with empathy. This was evident after the death of his colleague Dr Simon Hercules. “I do not want to recall those days,” he said, getting emotional. “As a doctor, death is nothing new to me. The very beginning in the MBBS course will be with dead bodies. But I have never known this fear of death.”
Hercules, 55, a neurosurgeon, was the chairman and managing director of New Hope hospital. He got infected with Covid-19 after performing a surgery on a patient from abroad. Though he had fever and cough, he did not realise he was infected. Soon, he was admitted to a private hospital in Chennai with severe breathlessness. None of his relatives or acquaintances could visit him in the intensive care unit.
This story is from the March 28, 2021 edition of THE WEEK.
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This story is from the March 28, 2021 edition of THE WEEK.
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