Amravati:
When Vaishali Wasule, recovering from delivering twins, was served a tonic by a hospital attendant, she thought it smelled strange. "They gave me the dose. I said it was like phenyl", she recalls from her hospital bed. "The attendant said it was a vitamin dose. She said, 'Am I mad to give you phenyl!' I had it. After sometime there was a burning sensation in my throat and I wanted to throw up."
Vaishali was among seven new mothers who were, in fact, made to drink phenyl at the maternity ward of a government hospital in Amravati, Maharashtra.
The women started throwing up within minutes of drinking the disinfectant. Other female patients then refused to have what the hospital staff kept insisting was a "vitamin tonic."
The blatant medical negligence stems from a case of petty theft. Someone in the hospital, authorities say, wanted to steal the disinfectant and poured it into an empty tonic bottle. A nurse who was meant to serve the tonic delegated the task to a cleaner who couldn't tell that what he was serving to patients was lethal.
The police is ready to file a formal case of negligence against the hospital.
"This is a serious slip-up because every patient is our responsibility", says Dr. C. L. Sonkusre, the Civil Surgeon at the hospital.
Vaishali and the six other women who drank the phenyl cannot breast-feed their newborns - an additional matter of concern for them as they deal with the after-effects of their own illnesses caused by the phenyl.