Hope is on the way

She would like to forget the ordeal. To just give up.

But the pain won't let her.

She would like to end it all. For with life's end, it all ceases -- the unceasing ordeal, the relentless pain.

But the hope in the eyes of her little ones won't let her.

And so, every morning, Fathima Beevi goes through the ordeal all over again. The trip to the hospital. The tubes, intruding, violating her body like alien fingers. The injections.

The daily dialogue with her doctor, that goes: "Will I get somebody's kidney soon, doctor?" "No."

Then there is Nilima. She of the lovely arched eyebrows, the beautiful black eyes that could launch a thousand fantasies. If only there was light in them, that is.

There isn't. Those lovely eyes are the envy of all who see them. But those eyes see nothing, no one.

"Will someone donate their eyes, doctor? Will I see again?" "I don't know."

Eighty people, on an average, die daily in Madras alone. Of these, only two donate their eyes -- the other 78 pairs go, unseeing, to the grave. Meanwhile, Neelima -- and several thousand people like her -- see nothing.

The reason is simple -- those who have eyes do see. But they are not aware.

Not aware that today, organ transplants are routine. That skilled surgeons can, today, make the blind see, the dying revive by the replacement of a body part.

Sometime back, famed cardiac surgeon Dr K M Cherian of the Madras Medical Mission told Rediff On The NeT, "In our country, an ambulance carrying a dying patient cannot reach its destination because the lorry in front of it will not pull to the side and give way. People should think of the blind person who has not seen light, the man who is hooked to a dialysis machine, the man who has never slept lying down. We are depriving them of a chance to live a quality life, even though to provide it would cost us nothing. Why should society, caste and colour come in the way of a humanitarian impulse?"

Startling enough in itself, but Dr Cherian had even more shocks in store for me. "Several people are ready to donate organs of their relatives who suffer brain death," he told me. "But there is jealousy in the medical profession, and this prevents more operations. Sadly, commercialism has crept into medicine."

In this context, an initiative undertaken by Tamil Nadu's Dr MGR Medical University, under its vice-chancellor, Dr (Major) D Raja, is as welcome as sight to the blind. The institution is on the verge of launching an information digest about organs for patients and hospitals who are badly in need for transplantation purposes. And this, as far as India is concerned, is a first.

Dr Raja conceived of this in course of his earlier tenure at the head of the institution's authorisation committee for transplant surgeries. At the time, he noticed that people from all over the country, and even from abroad, came to Madras for transplantation surgery. He also witnessed an incident wherein a hospital could not make use of the organs of a brain dead patient, who was a donor.

"Right then, I realised that the prime need is to improve communications between donor, hospitals, and potential recipients. Today, we do not have a streamlined system. When the organ is ready, the patient cannot be tracked. We do not even have, in each hospital, a list of patients and the organs they need, nor do we have the corresponding list of potential donors. Again, one hospital might have received an organ it cannot use then, while in another hospital there is a patient waiting for that organ -- but there is no communication between the two hospitals, so the organ goes to waste and the patient waits in vain.

"At the time, I couldn't figure out how to connect the three elements in the chain," explains Dr Raja. "For years, this stayed in my mind, so when I because vice-chancellor of this university, the first thing I did was arrange meetings with the heads of all hospitals in Madras, with the aim of formulating a method of sharing information that would be beneficial to all of them."

The project, as envisaged, was divided into four phases. In phase one, he would connect all government hospitals in Madras through the university. Then he would rope in the private hospitals. Stage three was to extend the web to cover all hospitals in the state. And in stage four, the hospitals all over India would be linked in one vast, life-giving chain.

It is all done, obviously, through computers. Functioning 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, the computer network will store and process information about donors, organs, patients, needs. The minute information is received about a donor dying, the computer automatically matches it with potential recipients, and alert the concerned hospital.

We are now in stage one, and the university is connected to the Government General Hospital, Royapettah Hospital, and three private hospitals that, without waiting for the formal launching of stage two, have quickly hopped on the bandwagon -- namely, the Ramachandra Medical College Hospital, Apollo Hospital and Madras Medical Mission. By year end, all hospitals in the south Indian metrop will be connected.

"Our university is starved of funds," says Dr Raja. "But somehow, we manage. I believe that a medical institution has an obligation towards society, an obligation to the public. And this is only a beginning...."

Photograph: Sriram Selvaraj