Aruna Shanbaug has been in a vegetative state since she was raped by the hospital’s ward boy in 1973
Less than a week after International Nurses Day, Aruna Shanbaug, former junior nurse at KEM hospital, finally breathed her last today morning at around 8:30 am.
67-year old Shanbaug had been brain-dead and in a vegetative state since the night of 27 November 1973, when she was sexually assaulted by a ward-boy who also choked her with a dog-chain. This cut off blood supply to the brain, resulting in brain stem contusion and injury to her cervical cord, which also left her cortically blind. She was artificially kept alive by doctors and nurses at Mumbai’s KEM Hospital.
As per the hospital staff, Shanbaug was diagnosed with a bout of pneumonia last week following which she was admitted in the medical intensive care unit (MICU) and had to be fed through tubes. Dr Ahmad Pazare, Head of the Medicine department, KEM Hospital, informed that she was recovering and all her other medical parameters were fine. However, today she suffered a sudden attack and could not be saved.
Over the past 42 years, Shanbaug’s case had posed many uncomfortable questions about euthanasia and right to life, about the right of hospitals and healthcare institutes to block resources for patients who stood no chance of recovery given the India’s extremely skewed patient:bed ratio. Her demise will probably raise all these questions once again and hopefully lead to a more humane solution, within the legal system, for dealing with patients like Shanbaug as well as taking steps to protect the nursing fraternity from such incidents in the future.
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