When I said I wanted to experience the ‘real’ India, I didn’t mean the emergency room
A literature festival was to be the highlight of an eagerly anticipated trip to India. Then came a sudden medical detour – and an unexpected chance to experience another side of the subcontinent.
By Gay Alcorn
Lake Pichola in Udaipur may be picturesque, but it was eating at a restaurant here that started the writer’s troubles.Credit: Getty Images
The best of travel might be the unexpected bits, but I wasn’t expecting to spend three nights in a hospital in India being cared for by a maid named Jyoti who spoke no English and shaved my pubic hair with a safety razor.
Before my party’s three-week trip to northern India in January, I’d casually requested from our guide, Amrit, to visit some non-touristy things, but I hadn’t meant a hospital. I hadn’t really meant real India. My daughter, Beth, and son-in-law, Dan, were with me, and a friend was soon to join us for the highlight, the Jaipur Literature Festival, self-dubbed “the world’s grandest celebration of books and ideas”.
We were not roughing it. After a day spent in Udaipur, in the north-western state of Rajasthan, which included touring a palace that took 400 years to complete, a boat ride and an outdoor foot massage, my little group had dinner and drank chocolate martinis in a rooftop restaurant overlooking Lake Pichola – as close to tourist heaven as we could imagine.
The author with her daughter, Beth, son-in-law, Dan, and guide, Amrit.Credit: Courtesy of Gay Alcorn
I returned to my hotel room, felt nauseous, vomited again and again, and experienced a searing pain in my lower back – a pain as consuming as childbirth. Beth Googled appendicitis, but the pain was in the wrong place. Amrit pushed us into a tuk-tuk, and we sped over rough roads to a private hospital, me hunched over, rocking with pain and fear.
I could barely focus, but it seemed like a small hospital, clean if a little tired. I dreaded waiting for hours in emergency, as I may have done in Australia, but there were few people around and I saw a doctor immediately. He suspected kidney stones, hard deposits of minerals and salts that form in the kidney and begin to move. “Excuse me, I have to vomit,” I said, running to the bathroom.
I spent the night in the ICU, curtained off from other patients and pleading for more pain relief. Beth lay on the floor beside me until the nurse said she could take a bed unless it was needed for an urgent case – an unusual accommodation, we thought. A hospital is a hospital all over the world, but each beats with its own culture. Blankets in India are colourful, with large orange flowers. A poster on the wall pictured a doctor with his hands folded into a heart shape: “A miracle is a moment,” it said, “but healing is a process.” A nurse in a pink uniform put his feet up on a chair and tried to sleep.
The hospital sign telling it like it is to patients.Credit: Courtesy of Gay Alcorn
The next morning, tests were done and a urologist, warm and gently spoken, outlined my options: the stones might “pass” through urination, but that could take weeks, or I could have a “procedure” to remove them. The idea of living with this pain for the trip’s remaining 10 days was unbearable, so I chose the procedure.
Until then, our holiday had been the usual experience of tasting and touching just the edge of a complicated country. It was my third trip to India, and I’ll go again, seduced by its energy and admiring of its determination to forge its destiny after subjugation for so long. I know travel is a fantasy tinged with guilt. We visit famous places polished-up for tourists, applaud traditional dancing at heritage hotels, queue to see monuments and galleries and, in India, sit in a small bus while a woman holding a baby taps on the window, begging for money.
Even in hospital, I was a tourist. It became clear that I was getting special treatment. I was moved to a private room with air-conditioning. The medical director, a gynaecologist whose family owned the 100-bed hospital, was taking personal care of me. “I look after the VIPs, the foreigners,” she told me. She wore a kurta and sandals and had an air of complete confidence.
Mostly, she said, it was because she spoke English, while the nurses were trained in Hindi and could understand just a few words.
The medical director suggested that it would help if I could review the hospital online, mentioning that I was Australian.
I saw one other white patient: a young Australian man with terrible gastro who was being flown home. The staff were Indian and it was dahl and chai for breakfast. Jyoti, striking in her sari, arrived several times a day to smile and sweep the floor.
I was grateful for the attention, but conscious of the legacy of British colonialism, that whites go to the front of the queue. The medical director said that many Indian-trained doctors go overseas for the money, but she preferred being close to her family. Indian doctors care for patients all over the developed world, including in Australia, while tens of millions of Indians, especially in rural areas, struggle to receive basic care.
With Jyoti, who spoke no English but who slept by the author’s bed on her final night at the hospital.Credit: Courtesy of Gay Alcorn
At the same time, medical tourism is booming in India because treatment by excellent doctors in good hospitals reportedly costs about 20 per cent of what it would in the West. Such is the reality of globalisation. Exporting doctors to rich countries; importing Western patients who can’t afford care at home.
I wasn’t here by choice, but I was a foreign patient from an affluent country, and the medical director suggested that it would help if I could review the hospital online, mentioning that I was Australian. The procedure was scheduled for 9pm. “We are a 24-hour hospital,” the medical director said with a smile when I queried the time. She told my daughter that they didn’t want me to spend another night in pain.
As I was wheeled into the operating theatre, I had a moment of panic, a fear of being in a foreign country where I couldn’t speak the language. Maybe there was some prejudice, too, about whether a poorer country could give a sole tourist the health care I assume as an entitlement.
Recovering after the procedure to remove the kidney stones.Credit: Courtesy of Gay Alcorn
The hospital was clean but a little tatty, the lifts creaking, the mat on the operating table worn and patched with masking tape. As the anaesthetist explained that she would now deliver the injection to my spine, I wondered, “What the f--- am I doing?” The urologist held my head between my legs and told me to relax. I’d never been in an operating theatre, never known what it was like to feel nothing below my waist. I tried to move my toes, to tense my buttocks. I looked up, and the doctor was holding my legs straight up in the air, toenails holiday red, and I couldn’t feel a thing.
“What’s that whooshing sound?” I asked. The laser breaking up the kidney stones, he said. His job was to insert a thin, flexible and lighted tube into the urethra to find the stones, and then blast them into pieces and remove them. I didn’t know it at the time, but the medical director popped in and out of the operating theatre to update Beth about what was happening. It lasted about 30 minutes, a “minimally invasive” procedure, the urologist called it, routine for him.
It went well and the pain was gone. The night before I was to leave hospital, I was told that I was the only white patient at the time. Beth returned to our hotel and the medical director worried that I’d be alone; the maid Jyoti can stay with you, she said. That’s not necessary, I replied. In case you fall or need something, Jyoti can sleep on the floor, she said, pointing to the hard tiles. She can sleep on the spare bed, I insisted too quickly.
Jyoti wore a maroon sari, a row of rings on her fingers and a red bindi between her eyes. She spoke no English, and my Hindi was limited to the numbers zero to five, “What is your name?” and “How are you?” It was Jyoti who’d been instructed to shave my pubic hair before the kidney stone procedure, using a safety razor with very little water or soap. Nothing was said, but she and I laughed at the absurdity of it.
A nurse showed me a picture of a patient’s stomach, her intestines spilling out. Confidentiality blown, I thought.
That night, when I went to the toilet, she woke up and scurried to my side. I tried to wave her from the bathroom, but she would not leave until I was back in bed. I smiled at her, thinking privacy in India was a foreign concept. The next morning, having had no shower for three days, I asked for a towel. The bathroom was set up Indian-style, with a big plastic bucket to fill with water and a smaller bucket to throw water over yourself. But there was no towel. I mimed what I wanted and Jyoti left the room to fetch a nurse. They both looked perplexed, and handed me a face washer. I never quite understood it, but I did my best.
Another nurse showed me a photograph of a 67-year-old patient who’d recently been discharged. The story was difficult to follow, but it seemed as though the mirror at the woman’s hotel had collapsed, and shards of glass had impaled her stomach. Then she showed me a picture of the woman’s stomach, her intestines spilling out. The nurse was fascinated by this, and keen to share. Confidentiality blown, I thought.
My stay cost a little more than $4000, which was later covered by insurance.
I hugged Jyoti goodbye. She’d spent the night with me and woken to her job of sweeping the floor. She showed me a photograph of her daughter on her phone and she hugged my daughter, who had come to collect me.
The author, healthy again, at the Jaipur festival.Credit: Courtesy of Gay Alcorn
I was driven away from the hospital in our little tourist van, and on to the Jaipur festival. This was meant to be the highlight, a feast of Nobel and Booker prize-winning authors, fiction and non-fiction writers, Indian judges and writers and activists, all debating and discussing the big issues of our time, from climate change to the future of democracy. It was heaving with young, middle-class, English-speaking Indians, ambitious for their country and what it could become.
I loved the festival, but it wasn’t what I remember most about this trip to India. That was the small hospital, the feeling of being tossed off the tourist trail, vulnerable and in pain, cared for by strangers as we tried to understand each other.
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