DNipCare- Rehabilitation Prgram

DNipCare trying to rehabilitate the family of a patient
with a Sewing Machine
On a cold Sunday morning, with a recalcitrant sun playing a game of celestial hide and seek, the hustle and bustle in Pragati maidan in Delhi, currently playing host to the International Trade Fair is in full swing. However, for the volunteers of DNipCare, it is just yet another weekend to visit their enlisted ailing patients. The vehicle of one of the volunteers carrying four of them is headed to a dingy flat near Khadde vale masjid in Gautam Vihar at Tisri Pushta of Yamuna River. Imran Ahmed*, suffering from Cancer and prostate enlargement lives in a rented one room accommodation with two young unmarried daughters; forced to discontinue their education and his wife. Cycle rickshaws and thelas seldom give way to mechanized vehicles in these crowded narrow bylines, but the indomitable spirit of the volunteers is raring to do something different from their daily chores of livelihood. The four volunteers could not have been a greater study in contrasts: From one doing the job of advising his department under Government of India on its economic policies and programmes to a successful businessman managing his own establishment throughout the week while the third does the nitty gritty of the accounts and programmes in Central Government with the fourth being a qualified allopathic doctor utilizing his weekend holiday and rather enjoying in making it also a day to be with patients for mitigating their pains and problems. The common binding link that all four shares is the Palliative training they obtained on the same lines of rendering this care in Kerala for ailing patients suffering from long term or life limiting diseases. The car came to a screeching halt as a sewer stretched across the road is gaping open and there was hardly any space for a four wheeler to pass through. There was still over a mile of potholed, broken roads left to be covered to reach the residence of Imran Ahmed. The weighty issue was hardly given a thought before a quick decision to move the vehicle to another byline was taken, and we began to wend our way towards our destination, but it was not easy at all. The sewing machine, part of the rehabilitation package for the family of Imran Ahmed from DNipCare, was also to be carried along. It was a collaborative effort with the volunteers carrying the weighty machine in turns, all the way to meet with the wonderfully delighted smiles of the Ahmed family. DNipCare was finding a solution to the family’s immediate requirements of livelihood and thereafter to ponder over the ways and means to continue the education of his daughters after addressing the disease Ahmed is suffering from. The journey was not ending there, but next destination was a more distant Rohini residence of Mrs. Rema Mukherjee*, another cancer patient. The psycho-social and medical support under Palliative Care continues unabated on Saturdays and Sundays for the teams under DNipCare irrespective of the distance they have to traverse in this metropolitan city Delhi. Team combination and patients differ, but the focus of all remains the same; provide a possible quality life to the patients at their residences. Every volunteer has now realized that sympathy is not enough, but active thinking and action to make a difference in the lives of the hapless patients are the planks of Palliative Care discipline. The mission continues for the volunteers in every form whether it is carrying rice and wheat flour bags along with other provisional items to the deserving patients’ homes or taking the patients to the hospitals, diagnostic centers, providing medicines and required psycho social support by taking the active role as their own kith and kin to care.
(*Names of Patients changed to hide their identity)

kv hamza
Gen. Secretary