The Pain of COMATOSE

For 42 years, Aruna Shanbaug lay in a vegetative state after she was sexually assaulted at the hospital where she worked as a nurse

- Haima Deshpande

“ARUNA Shanbaug is a memory now, something that I do not want to remember because along with her memory comes her pain. Shanbaug was an important part of all of us at the King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital in Parel, central Mumbai,” says Anjali Parade, former sister in-charge of Ward Number 4. She, along with a team of 11 nurses, doctors and hospital staff, looked after Shanbaug—a nurse at KEM—who was paralysed and in a vegetative state following a heinous sexual assault at the hospital. The attack had left her blind and deaf too.

For 42 years, Shanbaug lay in a vegetative state, completely incapable of performing even the basic human activities. Every nurse who worked the shifts in Ward Number 4 of the hospital tended to her needs. They talked, laughed, read books to her and played music throughout the day in her room, the side-room of the ward. She was sponged and shifted from one side to the other every two hours to avoid bed sores. For over four decades, the nurses and the ancillary staff, who worked in the ward, were family to Shanbaug. That’s because she was abandoned in that condition by her relatives. When she passed away on May 18, 2015, at the age of 66, her skin was spotless despite the decades spent in bed.

The nurses would pool together their meagre resources and buy her comfortable cotton gowns, bed sheets and every other item a woman may need. “We knew that she would never recover. The attack was so brutal that we would get goosebumps whenever we looked at her lying on that bed getting frail each day. Yes, there were hospital gowns and bed sheets, but each of us wanted her to experience the comfort she may have got if she was normal. None of us had a lot of money then, but the doctors helped too,” says Parade.