By the Reckoning of a Librarian

Dr. Vijay Pandey walked up to the plush carpet and lowered himself onto it with a sigh of relief. He wiped the perspiration off his face with a kerchief and poured himself a glass of water from a side table nearby. His wife entered with a bowl of ice-cream and switched on the air-conditioner.

“It’s rather hot outside, isn’t it?” she asked as she handed the bowl to him.

Dr. Pandey scooped a spoonful and replied “It sure is but it’s become hotter inside the hospital.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a patient died today because of a slight lapse on the operation table and the incident got reported to the higher ups. Now they will be after my neck if the family files a law suit.”

“I’ve always told you that it is a thankless job you do at the hospital. People don’t realize that what they are getting from doctors is much more than what they are paying them. I am a Chartered Accountant and we have concepts of transfers and transactions in accountancy. The former is a single sided affair while the latter is a double one. Saving someone’s life is a transfer and no amount of payment can make it a transaction. That is why medical profession is considered as a noble profession. I think that if you resigned your job and started your own practice it would be better paying and more rewarding.”

“All in good time dear. I still have a reputation to build before starting out on my own. What you say might have worked in the past. Now, the times have changed and people demand professionalism everywhere. They want what they pay for and there are strict laws to protect their rights.”

“Huh! Rights….in our country, who cares for rights? What matters most for success here are your social connections and shrewdness. Anyway, what happened exactly?”

Dr. Pandey did not reply immediately as he had ice-cream in his mouth. He slowly rolled the cool mass inside before gulping it and said, “You see, it is like this. We were operating for a bypass heart surgery today and as usual I was the anesthetist. Well, as everything went well for the first hour, I relaxed and went out to attend a very urgent phone call….some confusion in emergency drug purchases which had to be answered immediately and the pharmacologist was not immediately around. What I did is against the strictest principles but I did not suspect any immediate danger to the patient. And yet when I returned to check the flow level of the drug vapor in the oxygen mask after an hour, the damage had been done. It seems that the nurse I had left in attendance, forgot to re-adjust the levels of the drug after the artery graft had been put into place resulting in blood poisoning. The patient bled to his death on the operating table itself and I am being held responsible for negligence.”

His wife rolled her eyes and threw up her hands. “What do they expect? Everybody makes mistakes sometimes, so why not doctors? The patient won’t get back his life by prosecuting you. On the contrary, other patients might suffer as you are the only anesthetist out there. No good doctor joins that hospital because the salaries are rather low.”

Dr. Pandey just shrugged his shoulder absentmindedly, put the empty bowl away on the side table and leaned back on a bolster. “Let’s see, what happens. I was after all called out on official errand only. But being an experienced doctor I am expected to have shown better discretion. The patient’s relatives are influential people and are threatening action but we have managed to confuse them up for the time with medical jargons. Tomorrow I plan to visit the city library near our hospital and read up a bit on the legal procedures and implications of such a case before I talk to the hospital’s legal advisors.”

The next day Dr. Pandey casually walked into the city library in the afternoon. All the physicians of his hospital were entitled to free memberships of this library which was located just across the street but this was the first time that Dr. Pandey had actually entered it. The librarian in charge was an elderly gentleman in his late fifties, who peered up enquiringly from behind his glasses at him. Dr. Pandey was not very sure what he wanted and so he handed his identity card and the membership card to him. He took a quick look and nodded curtly.

“So, you are Dr. Vijay Pandey from the hospital across”, he said eyeing him rather peculiarly which made the doctor feel a bit uneasy in his shoes. “How can we help you?”

“Well, I umm…I was looking for some legal books on medical malpractice court suits. Could you suggest something for anesthetists?”

“Sure. Come with me.” The librarian was still looking at the doctor fixedly but he slowly got up and led him towards the stairs to the upper floors housing the books and journals. He handed Dr. Pandey a carefully chosen stack of medico legal journals and a couple of thick books. “I suggest that you read up on the case of a young table tennis champion of the country who lost his eyesight due to the negligence in administering anesthetics in a renowned hospital in Chennai that is given in the topmost journal. It is a very famous case. You may read the fat books if you want but they are purely legal text and you may not get anything out of them in a quick glance. It would be better if you focused on the journals. They give the actual stories.” With that the librarian left him and returned to his table and Dr. Pandey carried his load to a nearby reading table and settled down to his research.

After about an hour of reading however, Dr. Pandey felt highly overcome with anxiety and regret. He had been negligent in his duty… there was no doubt about it now and attending a phone call for the purchase department would not be considered a valid excuse. People would object that he had used the pretext to escape the tense and oppressive atmosphere of the operation theater for an hour leaving just a nurse in control, even though he had done that quite a few times earlier with no untoward consequences. All the anesthesia cases reported in the journals were very similar to his own, starting with the case of the table tennis champ in Chennai, and in all these cases the court had ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. He felt his confidence slipping out and a cold sweat breaking across his forehead. He felt dizzy and overcome with a deep fear for his reputation. He recalled that he was only an ordinary anesthetist in his mid-thirties who still had a long way to go before he could earn the required popularity to establish his own practice. If he were to lose his job now in disgrace with the infamy of a law suit hounding him all his life his career would be finished. He wondered how he would then provide for his wife and their young son. He decided that it would be best if he could personally meet the bereaved family members of the victim, ask their forgiveness and settle the matter out of court. He immediately got up and left in a hurry without even bothering to close the journal he had been reading last.

A week later, the staff were talking about Dr. Pandey at the hospital reception, when he entered the lobby as usual. As he punched in his attendance, he noticed that everybody had stopped talking and were looking at him.

“Good morning. What’s the matter?” he asked.

The receptionist, who was friendly with him, pushed across the newspaper at him. On the second page, there was a detailed news report about his negligence on duty and his hasty out of the court settlement with the victim’s family members in complete acceptance of his charges. The news article even quoted the high pecuniary compensation he had paid the victim’s family to keep them from approaching the court by quickly selling off considerable real estate properties at cheap rates. In short, the news item had managed to badly hurt his professional reputation that he had sought to avoid through his out of court settlement. Now though he would have his job at the hospital but that’s all he would have. If he wanted to start a private practice he would have to really work hard at building his reputation from scratch or consider moving to some other city.

He looked blankly at the receptionist and muttered, “But why?”

The receptionist said, “We had contacted the editors of this newspaper asking for their reasons for publishing this. They say that this will induce the doctors to be more careful with people’s lives in future as lives are not for sale after all.” Then she looked keenly at him and asked, “But why yourself, Sir? Why did you decide on this so hastily and did not consult the hospital’s legal experts first?”

“There was no time. I had to act fast and hush the matter up before anybody filed a case. Otherwise I would have been fired by the board of directors.”

“But why did you feel so sure of the judgment going against you. The hospital would have tried to protect you.”

“No use. I read up various cases similar to mine at the library across and all of them reported judgments in favor of the plaintiffs. After that I did not want to waste any time wrangling legalities with our advisors and consultants.”

The receptionist suddenly clapped her hand over her mouth in exasperation. “Oh, I hope you did not seek the help of the librarian there? The librarian is a very close friend and a neighbor of the victim. I happen to live in the same street and know that they were the best friends and used to play chess every evening. He was with the funeral party that cremated the body in the evening after the failed operation.”