8.9
The Anniversary Reflection
A Year of Dark Days and the Silence of the Monitors
On May 21, 2021, I sat down at my desk and wrote a short post on Facebook. It was exactly one year to the day since COVID-19 had breached the gates of our hospital. In the life of an institution like MGIMS, which has stood for over half a century, a year is usually a mere heartbeat. But this was no ordinary year. It was a year where every hour felt like a day, and every noon felt as bleak as midnight.
I remember the first patient who arrived at our repurposed COVID block exactly 365 days prior. He was a sixty-four-year-old man from Washim, 225 kilometers away. He became, in a series of tragic “firsts,” our first COVID admission, our first patient to be intubated, and our first death. Looking back from the peak of the second wave, that single death seemed like a distant, somber warning of the deluge that was to follow.
The Noise of Uncertainty
Over that year, we admitted more than five thousand patients. We delivered hundreds of babies to infected mothers, and we vaccinated thousands. Yet, the statistics do not capture the atmosphere of those twelve months. The nights in the ICU were never truly silent; they were filled with the relentless, aggressive noise of survival—the hiss of high-flow oxygen, the urgent beeping of monitors, and the alarms that refused to rest.
I recall the endless loop of questions that defined our conversations in the staff cafeteria and the hallways. How long will this last? When will we find a treatment that actually works? How do I hug my children when I get home without fearing I am poisoning them? As medical professionals, society looked to us as soothsayers, but the truth was that we were as uncertain as everyone else. We learned, painfully, that in a pandemic, the only thing you can be certain of is uncertainty itself.
The Death of Touch
Someone remarked to me that the practice of medicine in Sevagram changed more in that single year than in the previous fifty combined. We are a hospital built on the Gandhian philosophy of being “with” the patient. But the virus forced us into a “no-touch” reality. We stopped seeing faces; we saw masks and goggles. We distanced ourselves, we touched less, and we listened from afar.
Fear was the constant companion of every shift—fear in the OPDs, fear in the labs, and a heavy, silent fear carried home in the car at the end of the day. And yet, we did not stop. With fear in our hearts and hope on our lips, we kept going. I watched our ICU teams wrest lives from the tightening jaws of death, and each of those “discharged” stories brought a flicker of light to days that were otherwise heavy with loss.
The Mirage of the Lull
By late January 2021, we had allowed ourselves a collective sigh of relief. The wards were emptying. The ventilators had finally stopped hissing. We believed, perhaps naively, that the monster had retreated for good. We began to talk about “normalcy” again.
But the virus was merely catching its breath. The second wave arrived with a merciless force that made the first year look like a rehearsal. We woke each day unsure if we were living through a nightmare or a waking reality. Wards overflowed. Staff fell ill just days after being vaccinated. We found ourselves sending “get well soon” messages to the very colleagues who, 48 hours earlier, had been standing beside us in the trenches.
The Invisible Legacy
As I reflected on that anniversary, I thought of Dr. Sushila Nayar, who founded this college in 1969. I wondered what she would have made of her institution during this crisis. I believe she would have been proud—not of a flawless execution, because perfection was impossible—but of the fact that we stayed.
We practiced medicine guided by science, not by the loud, irrational currents of social media. We drew extraordinary work from ordinary people—the attendants, the drivers, and the sweepers who are often invisible in times of calm but became the bedrock of our survival. This was a once-in-a-century pandemic, and it tested our resolve to its very core.
The anniversary was not a celebration; it was a testimony. We had learned that while we couldn’t predict the future, we could defend the present. We stood tall when the world fell silent, and we realized that “This too shall pass”—but it would leave us forever changed.