Devajyoti Basu

Dad, always full of life and an avid Hollywood and world cinema watcher. He always told us, his family, consisting of his wife, our lovely mother and 2 children, that if ever the day comes that he needs to be put onto a ventilator, we should let him just go away.

Easier said than done, especially if it is a crime in the country you’re living in. I am sure Dad never thought about it because he probably never felt he could be in that situation.

October 2009. Just after the annual Durga Pujas, Dad’s health started deteriorating. I must mention at this point as most people in his advertising fraternity do, he used to smoke and drink pretty heavily until April 2006 when he had a stroke and was almost going into paralysis mode if the doctors hadn’t taken due care. He came out of it a fine man, scared and almost forced to lead a much healthier life.

Back in 2009, he complained of fever and cough. We thought it was almost an ordinary one as the weather changes during this part of the year here. But his fever just wouldn’t come down.

He was never quite the fashionista and always thought being smart and clever was always a part of the grey matter. Going with that stance he had started keeping Tagore kind of a beard, which finally turned out to be the bane.

Mom noticed one of those days that Dad had a huge lump under his chin and obviously it wasn’t visible because of the beard. Moreover he was taking some large tablet to suppress. This is when the alarm bells rang and we forced him to go to a hospital. A dear friend knew this doctor who used to operate on politicians an the high n mighty in the capital city so we thought Dad would be in good hands.

The doctor did a biopsy of the contents of the lump and told us it was TB (tuberculosis) of the mouth/ throat. We were dismayed by the word TB but thought that it is curable so it was not as worrisome. On our part, we were pretty sure it was cancer or something.

Dad was put on heavy duty AKT 4 medicines but from hereon his condition just went downhill.

His appetite had gone down. He was breathing very heavily, with a lot of difficulty, his stomach had swollen. We all thought these were side effects of the TB medicines. The doctor who treated him for TB actually told us he was getting better and this was normal to happen. By about the third week of October, things were going quite out of hand and we took him to a gastroenterologist and stomach expert in a very reputed hospital for a second opinion. He said that my father had acidity in his stomach because he had not been eating well and the heavy dosage of medicines. He recommended an endoscopy in a day or two.

The next day my mother noticed that my father had started passing blood in his stools.

30th October, the day I was woken up by a very frightened mother of mine who said dad needs to be admitted to the hospital this very minute. He was a very stubborn man and wasn’t very fond of hospitals.

We reached Max Super Specialty hospital in Saket, New Delhi at around 12:30pm. Dad was weak but walked into the hospital, not on a wheelchair or a stretcher still. But in about an hour, he had slumped and his condition had deteriorated way beyond. We had got him to the hospital under the idea that we would need to admit him to a room where he gets proper facilities and food through IV. Little did we know that his was an extremely critical ICU case. The ground beneath our feet collapsed. But none of us felt until now, nowhere close, that the man who walked into the hospital, leaving all his writings and films and music behind would come out a dead man.

He was taken to the ER because there were no beds available in the ICUs because Dengue cases were on the rise. His condition went bad so quickly that he had to be taken to the resuscitation room to revive.

Once in the ICU finally in the evening, he was straightaway put on the ventilator. His BP had become precariously low and so were his oxygen saturation levels. He was put on all kinds of medication from here on, medicines like Nor Adrenaline to pump up his BP. But he was awake, knowing fully well that something was really wrong and looking at us blankly as if saying sorry to put us through this. Hours became days and the days passed away so very slowly. Dad was going away. The doctors told us on the 1st of Nov that Sepsis might have hit him and we might have to give him something called Xygris by Eli Lily, which was supremely expensive but might reverse the Sepsis procedure. The side effect was that it creates internal bleeding. We checked with doctors from far and near if we should go ahead but then, what choice did we have? A very small amount was given with our consent. But the side effect prevailed upon Dad and the medicine had to be withdrawn. It was as if nothing was left to cure him except prayers. India is a multi cultural country and friends from different religions prayed for him, did Reiki, but I think he was closer to God by then rather than come back to us.

The doctors were dying to do an MRI but how could they do it? They had to take him to the ground floor MRI room for that but dad was not in a position to be shifted, with a ventilator pumping in oxygen and the medicines keeping his BP normalised. On the 4th of November, I think, his pupils were dilated and the doctors for the first time said maybe the brain has taken a beating. I was shocked. I said to myself, I will never hear Dad hereon even if he came back home.

I still remember a vision when he had this huge tubes in his mouth and he met my mom and tears started flowing down his cheeks. His brain functions were still there then. Then once, another time, he was sleeping under sedation but kept throwing his limbs up and down. I could understand that his mind could not understand why he was tied up. Though he was in his sleep, he was focused enough to know that.

Gradually though his BP was normalising and on the 7th of Nov, the docs deemed it fit to do the MRI. He was put on a Bi-Pap machine (physical pumping machine) and rushed to the MRI. The doctors decided to do a MRI of the brain and then the stomach to see what had gone wrong. One couldn’t get a darker report than that. Several infarcts had almost maimed his brain. Before the docs could reach his stomach, they lost his pulse and his BP had gone wayward again. He was rushed back to the ICU, again with the parameters he had been admitted on the first day.

Patches on his skin and the tips of his fingers and toes had started going bluish black as if hit by someone. His stool was constantly showing blood matter, reminding of us of the Xygris drug’s side effects.

The neuro doctor administered the GCS or the Glasgow Coma Scale or painful stimuli, light in front of the eyes, etc., and told us that he had no activity or, in medicinal terms, he was brain dead.

The doctors in all this had kept telling us that the liver was gone but the lungs and the heart were still going strong. Now there was a very different story. All of his parts had started ceasing slowly. The neuro doctor told us that there is no point keeping him here and we started arguing with him what to do. After all he’s the man who’s given birth to me and my sister. We can’t pull off the plug on him or take him home which would mean exactly the same thing…but then Dad, he always did things his own way. On 11th Nov evening, he had a massive cardiac arrest and he passed away at around 5:30pm.

I have never had closure on this, this disease and how he went away like sand from someone’s hand. I am not a doctor but I have spent these 3 years enquiring what could have happened. How did his condition go so bad, so quickly? Did he know? I don’t have answers to these. But I really hope this account helps someone who is in need. It is a very silent killer. But worse off than cancer or AIDS because you don’t even understand the nature of the disease.

Dad, Rest in Peace, wherever you

Source: by Indraneil Basu (Devajyoti's son)