For the last three weeks, my mother Asharani Pattanayak, at the age of 91, has been trying to overcome the trying tricks, the ‘age’ is playing upon her.
She is trying to foil the design of time, of course, with the able advice of the competent doctors of the Capital Hospital of Bhubaneswar, particularly the treating physician, Dr. Sudarsan Dash (Gynecology), Dr. B.C.Panigrahi (Medicine), Dr. Ashok Panda (Nephrology) and the Chief Medical Officer Dr. Nirmala Dei.
Age plays havoc with senior persons everywhere.
Medical science and its practitioners try to stand by their side.
But determination and willpower of the patient are essential to make the medical endeavor successful.
My mother is an epitome of both these noble qualities. She has been co-operating with Dr. Dash and his colleagues to make medical science triumph over the cruelties of Time. And, hopefully, within a week, she shall come back home with her revived old self.
I confess, I am not as strong as is she. If this is not true, I wonder as I look at these pages, why have I not been able to come up with what should have been presented to my esteemed subscribers and readers up till now since her hospitalization?
Capital Hospital is the largest Government Hospital in the Capital City of Orissa (recently changed into Odisha by the idiots in politics under a law created by them under sheer misconception).
The number of patients it daily treats is as massive as that the well-known S.C.B.Medical College Hospital of Cuttack attends to.
It has a number of suites styled as Nursing Homes that are allotted to indoor patients on payment of rent. But, like age ruins the human body, the Nursing Homes are showing signs of physical decay.
The stained toilets attached to these suites are indicative of acute lack of maintenance.
The air-conditioner machines are indicative of how rotten could be the instruments if the essential necessity thereof for patient management is forgotten by officials after installation.
The junked and damaged legs of the beds as well as of the 
steel wardrobes with nonfunctioning doors are indicative of how the authorities are negligent to the essential safety of the patients.
Yet, for people like us who stand for and subscribe to public sector, the Doctors and the Nursing Staff of the Capital Hospital are humans whose humane qualities have not yet collapsed under disastrous designs of the plutocratic government that willfully neglects the essential infrastructural necessities of government hospitals.
And, therefore, in Nursing Home No.8, despite threatening indoor environment, my mother is taking a turn towards the better.
From the core of my heart I thank the Doctors, the Nurses, the authorities of the Red Cross Blood Bank attached to this hospital for the nice, efficient, alert, timely and tireless support they have given to my mother in her determination to survive the cruel attack that the Time in the guise of ‘age’ has perpetrated on her.
She belongs to the generation of freedom fighters whose love and sacrifice for the motherland had forced the British to quit. Their dreams of freedom were woven around fair living environment. Now those dreams are destroyed by the agents of capitalism – the hybrids of post-independence opportunism – who in power, have thus dragged the public sector hospitals to deplorable condition of dilapidation in order to help the corporate houses hijack the most essential sector of health care. Yet, there are Doctors in the public hospitals, who, despite the capitalist design, are doing their best to save human lives using every available means within their rich.
And my mother, despite her age, is co-operating with the Doctors to overcome the disadvantage of not having a proper health-care environment in even the largest public sector hospital in the Capital City of the State.
She is trying to overcome the trying tricks of ‘Age’. And, in her, anyone of India of my age, aptitude, orientation and situation can see his/her own mother and think of how to protect and save the government hospitals from official negligence and subterfuge.
