For a myriad of reasons I hope the readers of this very piece of printed agony would be like the calm waves, caressing and comforting, and not like those demon waves, which like government authorities pull back from the suffering, only to come back at them with crushing force. To the readers hasty to leave for their offices to get your day started or to those “toilet newspaper readers” being pulled up by my rants I’ll get to the crux of the matter. A critical analysis of my highly frictional life would present before you, the picture of a man, fortunate enough to get qualified with an MBBS MS MCH degree and thereby being one in every 600 people worthy of hanging a stethoscope around their necks and at the same time, unfortunate enough to be one in a 10,000 diabetes patients to be slapped in the face by a chronic renal failure in the prime of my life.
The slap I talked of happened pretty fast. In the blink of an eye I was showered with a lot of medical complications, and within no time I was in the hospital bed undergoing haemodialysis every alternate day. This phase of an average middle class renal patient’s life destroys him not just morally but financially too, demanding roughly Rs. 40,000 every month. An exceedingly unpleasant and ugly law introduced by the government in 1992 or so, further revised in 2012, demands a donor, if altruistic, to have the same socio-economic status as that of the recipient so as to ensure no illegal outflow of money. The law also puts a bar on any sort of advertisement by the recipient
Cadaver (brain death) organ retrieval, the most ideal way of getting a kidney, fails in a country like ours due to the overwhelming number of unscientific superstitions that have piled up in our brains, and also because of interventions from some parts of the society. The lack of express highways, and air ambulances further makes this method nearly impossible in our developing nation. Such hindrances have allowed the black market to thrive. I know of at least five agents by name who, with their hunger for money, have become famous in the back-door business. Speaking from what I have heard from many, the monetary flow from a recipient’s side to the agent is about Rs 10-11 lakh, out of which the donor gets a maximum of Rs 5 lakh. On this the hospital charges float somewhere between Rs 3 lakh and 12 lakh. Ultimately, a renal patient, half dead by his disease, is killed to an inch of his life by the heavy bills which burgeons to over 20 lakhs.
Bringing back your attention to the aforementioned law that complicates transplants in the state, the so called monetary outflow can happen between siblings too, as in property transactions. There’s also another possibility of the altruistic donor, donating his/her kidney for appreciations or awards. On just opening the transplantation website of the government of Kerala, you can feast your eyes on over 1500 names in the waiting list for a cadaver kidney, and one should not be surprised to know that only about 4 transplants(cadavers) happened last year.
If as the law says the patient can get the organ only people of the same socio-economic status or from those of the same profession, should we assume that the union cabinet minister who got her kidney about a year back secured it from another union minister? Almost 90 percent of the altruistic donors today are females of financially broken families, that too, in their mid 30s. The law has but erected a wall in between the recipient and the donor. So summing up the situation, we’ve thousands waiting for the kidney on one side of the wall, and roughly the same number waiting on the other side ready to donate theirs. But this very wall, built for a nice reason, has served a platform for scavengers (hundreds of agents) to loot money from both sides.
Is the government not putting forward a solution because it wants such black market transactions to flourish? Or, is it that this issue is of no significance as it pertains to just a few people? The humungous number of formalities includes letters and certificates for both sides, the village officer’s, the MLA’s and the DYSP/ACP’s. Both the sides will have to endure questioning sessions in court rooms, and also the torturous inquisitions of the ethics committee. To the high-profile, self-proclaimed “VIPs” with huge political and financial influence, it hardly takes a couple of days, while for a normal layman, for the luckiest of them, the procedure will wrap up in a couple of years.
During the 45 days I was in the hospital, I saw about 22 transplant patients, rather 22 lucky ones, getting a second shot at life, to once again become the backbone of their shattered families, and to integrate themselves back into the world. By making it difficult for hundreds to gain a second chance, is not the government infringing upon the people’s right to life? Or is it that only financially well off people deserve to live in the country? Why isn’t there a gateway for transplants in our state as in the case of Maharashtra or Tamil Nadu? Are not poor men and women human enough in the government eyes?
(The author is a plastic surgeon who underwent kidney transplant recently)
