वैद्यो नारायणो हरिः – And its greater radius.

It was late night and my cousin brother had called in for a personal reason. He serves at Ayurvedic Department of Medicine.

Most of us have personally known people who are relentlessly working at the medical department, and from my own family, there are a couple of them in this ring today.

What I wanted to highlight was – Along with doctors, nurses, there are thousands in the medical department who are untiringly serving at the backend to connect the dots.

My brother is in emergency cell and is suppose to ensure the numbers in quarantine, responsible to facilitate to various departments including police, BBMP, Panchayat offices in Bangalore rural and surrounding departments. He takes care of Infra, Administration, and reports with multitasking on facilitating emergency calls. Beyond it, they need to stand as a backup for any situation.

While he could squeeze some time to talk to me, the entire period was distressing that most of us hardly know the truth. Let me quote a few:

-      They are required to be in PPE’s all the time which is more suffering than anything amidst summer. There are different varieties depending on exposure to the risk.

• It's challenging to eat, drink water and attend to natural calls with PPE’s and every time once they remove, it gets disposed of.
• As the number of PPE's are less, they are managing to use it for a prolonged period for more than eight hours in a stretch.
• He has lost 8kgs in the last 45 days.
• They hardly sleep for 5/6 hours in a day or less than that in a staggered fashion.
•  He has come home only four times in the last 45 days to show his face for 15minutes and he did not get inside.
• Everybody working in the department is required to undergo a test for themselves once a week.

-      Post all this, as things would come in control, they would be quarantined for 21days before they can get back to normal life.

This is just not the story of someone, but everyone who is working front end and back end.

Think about it. If we had any of our family members or a friend serving so tenaciously for the better good – can we even think of hurting them in our wildest of dreams??

Note: This article was penned during corona pandemic hit starting from December 2019 in China, spread across the globe. In India, the things started getting bad since April 2020 and it is been long chaos in the history of humankind in spite of being so technologically advanced compared to all previous centuries.