Ornamented yet Maddening Institute

The fact that no hospital has a gift or flower shop for visitors who’d like to cheer up their patients is the least of concerns. Spotless floors and pretty paintings are good enough for me any day. But with herons in your rock garden and elevator music (a first for Pakistan), you’d expect them to treat their private patients with some dignity at least. That’s why it’s so disappointing when a hospital known for its high standards and on the corporate panel of a number of leading organizations in Karachi so easily frustrates hospital visitors and patients that aren’t really such tough customers at all. For example, the family of a foreign patient from Dubai who just had a tumor removed isn’t being crabby when they scream at a male nurse who barges in to her private room when she’s getting a change of clothes. Or when her family visitors have to get a second opinion – not from a doctor, but from a front desk receptionist, since his colleague insists that she’s left the premises even when the only way that was possible would be through astral projection or other science fiction. Or when they refuse to serve dinner to the patient who’s just been operated and admitted since her family made the mistake of settling dues before dinner time. Or when security is only doing his duty when he becomes an automatic voice response system and keeps repeating ‘no I can’t allow you to wheel the patient out the gate’ into the taxi waiting right outside without even considering if he can make an exception to hospital policy of having the vehicle circle around and come inside. Okay, the last part wasn’t bad policy, though a couple of words vaguely resembling courtesy would have been a little softer. I guess I could have broken into a sob and a string of expletives, if only those damn herons weren’t so magnificent, and the hospital staff hadn’t had such impeccably clean shoes.