Against mercy death,KEM remembers Aruna as she was

KEM where Shanbaug worked and where she was sodomised by a hospital wardboy,who tied her neck with a dogchain cutting off oxygen supply to the brain,shares a special relationship with her. Nurses who knew her try to remember as she was,as a very bright nurse. “Today,had she been working,she would have been a matron,” says a senior nurse.

The youngest of seven children of Ramchandra Shanbaug,a native of Haldipur in Karnataka,Aruna had left her parents’ home accompanied by her cousin who worked in the city with dreams of becoming a nurse at the prestigious KEM Hospital.

Successful,beautiful and intelligent is how she is described by her then fiancé. She was engaged to be married at the time of the incident with a doctor at the hospital.

After the assault left her without the ability to see,hear or speak,KEM nurses have been taking care of her,bathing her and feeding her. Male employees are kept out and the hospital room kept locked for Shanbaug’s safety. Some new recruits are not aware of her past,but KEM authorities and staff make that extra effort to ensure that her life is a little happier,entering the room and checking in on her five times a day.

“Nurses take care of not just her medical but also emotional needs. Every year her birthday is celebrated. Since male staff are not allowed to attend to her I had seen her five years ago by chance when a film was shot on her life,” says a hospital source.

Dr Oak adds: “She has not even one bedsore,also she is fed (mashed) food without a tube. She enjoys eating non-vegetarian food.” She is also given freshly made idlis and rice and fish curry,which she had been fond of since childhood,in mashed form.

One of the first things he did when he became a dean,Dr Oak says,was take her blessings.

“Whatever treatment had to be given to her is given,” said one of the senior doctors in the hospital. “Now medically nothing can be done except treat her symptomatically.”

However,even doctors in favour of euthanasia say Shanbaug’s is a weak case for assisted death. “In order to qualify for euthanasia,a person should ask for it voluntarily,has to be of sound mind,must have exhausted all the existing treatment modalities along with pain management and the disease must be incurable. This case is weak in the sense that she is in a vegetative state and the question of power of attorney comes into picture,” says Dr Nagraj Huilgol,Head of Oncology at Nanavati Hospital who is pro-euthanasia.

With inputs from Swatee Kher