A roadside rescue

I woke up bleary-eyed just after 4 am. Cold in a hotel room. I realized the beeps of my mobile had woken me up. It was a message from Indigo airlines. The first few words — “We regret to inform you…” made me switch on the lights and wear my spectacles. Thankfully, the news wasn’t what I feared. Instead, my flight from Delhi to Nagpur had simply been preponed by 30 minutes. I smiled thinking that I would reach home earlier than scheduled on the last day of my vacation — and perhaps get some extra snooze time before Monday’s grind began.

But my delight was short-lived. That evening, boarding started late, and a quick snooze later, I realized the plane was still on the tarmac. We finally took off, and I landed an hour later than expected. To cut a long story short, my driver received me around 7.30 pm and we began the journey towards Sevagram via the Samruddhi highway.

Just before we got on the highway, we noticed a stationary truck with its headlights on. In the harsh glare, I saw an overturned motorcycle and a man bent over a woman lying on the road. We immediately stopped. I ran towards the couple and asked what had happened. The man, barely 25, was trembling — “Kavita… Kavita,” he kept saying (name changed). He said that his bike had jumped over a pothole and she had fallen. With his help, I turned her over carefully, supporting her neck. I felt warm sticky blood on my palms. It was too dark to see clearly, but her face and nose were bleeding heavily. Her pulse was steady, but she was unresponsive.

Within five minutes, a police vehicle arrived and — only to start photographing my car’s number plates. My indignant driver tried to explain that we hadn’t knocked down the bike, but we had only stopped to help. I asked the policemen to help us lift her into a vehicle and shift her to a nearby hospital. But they refused. “We’ll wait for an ambulance,” they said. Knowing the unreliable state of ambulances here, I offered to drive her to an emergency room and requested the police vehicle to escort us. They again declined saying that they would inform their other team on the wireless.

So, we did it ourselves. With difficulty, we managed to lay her in the back seat of my vehicle, and dumped two heavy bags and a heavy purse inside. The husband sat with her head in his lap, still in shock, as we drove towards Nagpur. We conferred and decided that the closest place to get emergency care was AIIMS.

The man kept weeping and we asked him to calm down and keep her neck stable. He told me that they were a young couple from Bhandara, married recently. They had started from Bhandara on his bike, and were going towards their rented room in Gumgaon. He worked for Flipkart. While he called his brother in Bhandara, I called Subodh, my husband, in Sevagram and told him we would be delayed. I then tried reaching Dr Neha, a former student of ours, and now an Associate Professor at AIIMS. No luck. As we drove, the lady stirred faintly and responded to our calls. I felt a flicker of relief — perhaps her injuries were not catastrophic as we’d imagined. We own an apartment just across AIIMS, which has been rented to four young nurses from Chattisgarh. Subodh called back to say that one of these nurses was on duty in the ICU until 8 pm and I would find her there.

As we reached the Emergency in AIIMS, I ran in saying that I had an accident victim and I needed a stretcher. I had to raise my voice — identifying myself as a professor — before anyone responded. “Take a stretcher and bring the patient,” one said. I asked for an attendant. “No attendant available.” My frustration rose. Finally, an intern came along. My driver and I somehow lifted the patient onto the stretcher — the wrong way at first — and then had to readjust.

I was hoping that the two junior doctors would have a look at her, at least because I told them that I was a doctor. My driver, until then off-loaded all their stuff and kept it near the security guard. He handed over the purse to the husband of the victim.

I asked him to narrate the history to the doctor. He started by telling them the name of his wife. “Kavita!” said the young resident, “But I am taking Sudha’s history. Which one is she? You go fill the registration form at the counter.” It was a scene straight out of Munnabhai MBBS, and I could not but feel frustrated at the way things were going. I went towards the ICU and luckily for me, found my nurse tenant. I knew that in this broken system, the only reliable people I could trust were the nursing professionals. She came and saw the patient, and assured me that she would handover charge to a friend of hers before her shift ended. Just then Neha called back and I explained the situation.

I rushed back to the patient, only to find that the registration form had not been made even after submitting the Aadhar card, just because the hospital didn’t accept Rs 10 via UPI. My driver found a coin in his pocket and that absurd problem was sorted. I turned back to see the two interns still looking uncertain, fidgeting with the BP cuff, because the patient was wearing a thick leather jacket. It needed patience not to scream. By then the woman began shivering, whispering for a blanket. But no one cared or listened. I managed to pull the scarf around her neck and wrap her body in that thin fabric. Neha called back to say that the head of the emergency unit had been informed, and now I could leave for Sevagram. I washed the blood off my palms at the nurses’ station, asked the young lad if he needed anything else, and then left the hospital an hour later, knowing that the patient was in safe hands — bruised, but likely spared major injury. Her leather jacket had saved her from major fractures.

As we resumed our drive, I reflected that the heavy bags she’d been carrying might have affected her balance as the bike hit the pothole. She wasn’t wearing a helmet either — a small oversight that could have had devastating consequences. As we crossed the Samruddhi toll booth, we encountered the same police vehicle again. I rolled down my window and told them that we had left the patient in safe hands. “Stop by the side. We need to speak,” the driver said. These chaps didn’t lift a finger when we needed help, and now they wanted to chat to hear the story. “No way,” I chuckled, “I’m going home.” And we drove off.

Forty minutes later, somewhere between fatigue and relief, I couldn’t shake off a thought — perhaps my delayed flight had been providence. But another thought lingered heavier: the abysmal state of emergency services in India.

I am a huge fan of medical web series like The Good Doctor on OTT platforms. And in each episode, you see trained paramedics and medics working like clockwork, following SOPs to the T. Trauma services there are impeccable. Why are we so callous here? Is the cost of life so low in India that we simply don’t care?

As someone who teaches medicine, I often wonder what we are really preparing our young doctors for. In classrooms, we debate competency frameworks and simulation models, yet when real emergencies unfold — on highways, in villages, or even just outside premier institutions — we crumble. We are raising a generation that excels at cracking MCQs, but struggles to take a blood pressure reading when the situation deviates slightly from the textbook. There is little emphasis on teamwork, communication, or calm under crisis — the very essence of emergency care.

Our infrastructure fares no better. We boast of AIIMS and trauma centres, but when systems depend on one intern and a ₹10 coin, the façade of preparedness collapses. Emergency response in India is not just about ambulances and equipment — it is about mindset, training, and accountability. Until our hospitals, police, and educators see human life as sacred, and time as critical, these scenes will keep replaying on highways across the country.

And somewhere between the siren that never came and the quiet hum of the highway, I couldn’t help but think — in a country of a billion beating hearts, how quickly we let one stop without a fight.