Dr Murtuza Ghiya (34) is getting a call from the hospital after work hours. He has a tough decision to make: Two dying patients and just one ventilator.
“We have to choose and It takes a toll,” said Dr Ghiya, who works as a frontline consultant at a Covid-19 ICU for poor patients -- brought in by the Municipal Corporation -- in Mumbai.
On average, there are 50 patients under his care in this Covid ICU. “Normally, in an ICU, a consultant is not supposed to attend to more than 10 beds. I am in charge of 50 beds and I get to spend just 10 minutes on a patient,” he said.
“You have a level of knowledge that you can’t apply because there aren’t enough hands or time."
Like countless Covid-19 warriors, he stands for hours in his PPE. He also uses a technique called 'proning' to help Covid-19 patients. The term 'proning' basically means putting patients in the prone position or flat on their stomachs with chests and faces down.
"Proning in PPE is a lot of hard work," he said. "Patients don’t cooperate with oxygen running through them. We have to manually lift them up and lay them on their stomach. That’s where the hard work is."
Dr Ghiya spends a lot of his time motivating patients to do proning. “I tell them ‘There is no magic drug and your lungs have to open. And I can’t put everyone on the ventilator’.”
Most of these patients don't know anything about Covid. “Also, they have very high-pressure masks on and it’s difficult to understand what they are saying,” Dr Ghiya said.
Dr Ghiya, who doesn’t charge any consultation fee from his patients, said that he is only trying to do his best in a broken healthcare system. “More than anything, actual work is done next to the patient’s bedside,” he said. A mantra he sticks to as he dons the PPE every single day.
Desperate calls for beds and oxygen are getting louder across the country and health professionals like Dr Ghiya are giving all they have within the limited resources at hand.
As Dr Ghiya, gets back to attending calls, he said, "Public healthcare is underfunded and there is unchecked corporatisation of healthcare. The actual pandemic is the broken healthcare system that is 100 years old. Covid just exposed it.".