Pune Family’s Tribute to Heroic Doctors For Saving Life At Delhi Airport
By Janhvi A. Nanavati
Pune, 29th July 2024: I often think of what makes a moment, a person, or an act extraordinary. The last few days have been giving me clues to what makes something and someone extraordinary.
On 14th July ’24, my in-laws were about to board a flight from Delhi Airport to their home in Bhubaneswar. When they reached the boarding gate, my mother-in-law (mamma) asked my father-in-law (papa) whether he was carrying his handbag that had their ids and other documents. Finding that he had forgotten his bag at the security, papa panicked and rushed towards the security gate. After climbing down from a long staircase, papa had a blackout and he fell.
Meanwhile, some instinct made my energetic mother-in-law trace back her steps from the boarding gate. However, when she called Papa’s number, a stranger answered her call saying that Papa had fallen down and had been given a Sorbitrate by a doctor-passenger. Mamma asked for directions to the place Papa was sitting. The next few minutes found them with airport medicos, who found elevated BP and sugar, and a slightly erratic ECG. Both Papa and mamma found it strange since he didn’t have a history of any cardiac disease. On advice of the airport medical team and her children, mamma took an ambulance to a hospital.
Over the next few hours, her son – my husband, her daughter and son-in-law, were in the hospital. Late in the night, they got Papa’s test reports. Papa’s blood reports showed elevated troponin – a substance found after a cardiac event. The next day, an angiography showed multiple blockages in his left coronary artery and the doctors advised a bypass surgery.
On 18th July – the day of Papa’s surgery, my husband found a video in which a doctor was administering CPR to an unconscious passenger at Delhi airport. That was the first time the family discovered that between the moments of blackout and consciousness, my father-in-law had received life-saving help from skilled doctors whose flight was delayed, and who rushed to his aid when they saw him fall.
The events captured by the video (thanks to the person who took the video and posted it) are etched in my mind – the doctor focused on administering CPR while calling to Papa and trying to revive him. The other doctors – her doctor husband, and another doctor couple – kept checking his pulse, and helped in giving him a Sorbitrate. Dr. Priya Garg kept administering CPR till his pulse became stronger.
When my father and a few others saw the video, they were like – “Wow! She saved his life”; or “My God! She got him back.”
Call it serendipity; call it magic; call it luck; call it divine intervention – it makes the whole thing a bit emotional, when the person involved is family to you. It took the entire day for my husband to search for the doctor in question – and in this case, even a wholehearted thanks to her seemed inadequate. Dr. Garg replied saying it was her moral duty and kindly enquired about my father-in-law.
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It brings me to the idea of extraordinariness. How the simple act of doing their work makes Dr. Garg and her fellow doctors extraordinary – attending to their call of duty without wondering whether they are getting anything out of it; and being a doctor when the moment demanded. And this humble write-up is my standing ovation to these extraordinary heroes.
Thank you, Dr. Priya Garg, Dr. Ramakant Goyal, Dr. Umesh Bansal, and Dr. Dolly Bansal – for giving the precious gift of time to my father-in-law.
