CHENNAI: For a person living with HIV or AIDS, healthcare is a key concern. But there have been enough incidents to show that even government institutions are not prepared to care for such patients. Ask 33-year-old Saroja*. Five months ago, she was admitted to the Sivaganga Government general hospital for her first delivery. Unfortunately, information that she was HIV+ quickly spread among the nursing staff and before she knew it, the nurses and ANMs were screaming abuses at her, accusing her of being an immoral woman. The patients in the general ward demanded she be moved out.“Nobody attended to me. I was asked to get onto the stretcher by myself. Then they put me in a room and locked it from the outside. My husband and I had kept our HIV status from our families. So when my mother-in-law heard I was HIV+, she refused to come near me. I delivered the baby by myself, lying in the stretcher, bathed in a pool of my own blood. I screamed and screamed but nobody came into the locked room. My baby was born dead,” she recalls, overcome with grief. No one in the joint family speaks to the couple.Similarly, a year ago, 32-year-old Malar went through a similar experience at the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital for Women and Children in Chennai. Doctors and nurses failed to attend to the HIV+ woman who was there for her first delivery. When the hospital staff came to know about her HIV+ status, she was asked to get onto the stretcher by herself. The baby she delivered died. Malar filed a complaint against the hospital at TANSCAS, but nothing has happened.“The attitude of the doctors and the hospital staff is shocking. When it comes to over-the-counter consultation, it is ok. But when a HIV+ person requires a surgery, it is almost impossible to get it done,” says Padmavathy, president of the Tamil Nadu Positive Women Network. The 35-year-old has lived with HIV for 13 years now. “I was diagnosed with a benign tumor in my uterus six months ago... Doctors said I had to have a surgery. I have checked with six hospitals, including government hospitals, and I have not found a single doctor willing to do the surgery. Each hospital asks me to spend `3000-`4000 for scans, but then they tell me they are not in a position to give dates for the surgery,” she says.“If this is the case with a person like me, works closely with TANSACS, and knows many doctors, then imagine the plight of poor rural women,” she asks.Even HIV+ children are left suffering for stigma. Palaniappan*, a 13-year-old HIV+ boy was being treated at the Anti-Retroviral Therapy Centre at the Kilpauk Medical College Hospital (KMCH). He was brought to the hospital with severe swelling and pain believed to have been caused by a tumour in his genitals. The hospital staff refused him painkillers and instead made him run from pillar-to-post in vain. After Express reported this on February 19, 2010 Dr Sekhar, medical superintendent of KMCH said, “I will... take action against the staff who are responsible for it, and ask the patient to get admitted.TANSACS supplies surgical kits to surgeons and conducts awareness programmes but little has changed.. Dr JS Rajkumar, of Lifeline Hospitals, Chennai, who has done more than 1,000 surgeries on HIV+ patients, “There is no medical basis for doctors to fear getting infected with HIV. There is a long queue of HIV+ people who require surgery, but are treated by doctors by over-the-counter drugs.” * Names changed
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