- Prateek Kotha
“The Presi’s got Swine Flu”- had filled everyone’s desktop as an IP message, while he himself was at the Naidu Hospital, getting checked for the same. Having the 3 basic symptoms, he was forced by Midhun, his best buddy, to get himself checked; hence a call for help came to Nishant with whom I was having dinner at that time.
Reaching the Medipoint Clinic in Aundh, by Rejil’s car, we faced a lady doc, who after examining Rejil, told me that he has the symptoms of Swine Flu and we should probably get him tested at either Naidu Hospital or Aundh Chest Hospital.
When we reached the latter, I felt like entering that deserted scene from the movie Resident Evil, with bare isolated brightly-lit space. After a bit of wandering we found a guy who instructed us to go to the second floor if we need to test for Swine Flu, where we found everyone wearing masks, who got paranoid as soon as they saw 4 guys without any such precaution.
The doctors out there had to follow the procedure of letting the patient first be admitted for at least 24 hours as it being a government hospital, but we couldn’t wait. Thus, the Presi decided to go back to the hostel.
But the good friends that we were, we couldn’t even allow that. Forcibly, we had to take him to Naidu Hospital. Meanwhile dialing Just Dial, I got the number of the hospital and took an appointment with a doctor there. As we reached the hospital, we realized we were standing in front of the 'quarantine ward', where we again met with a lady doc who advised for us all to get the check up done. But only Rejil finally went through the test and returned positive with tonsil, cold flu and lack of sleeping and eating disorders.
But wait, there’s a catch. She said that people here normally come as negative and return positive. And why is that? We had been to so many hospitals and hadn’t even had any precaution against the flu; obviously, if we didn’t have it till now, we may have caught the infection while during this little adventure of ours. (Naidu had 45 positive cases and Chest had 23 at that time)
Listening to this, Midhun panicked and ran from the scene as fast as he could, but Nishant and I were taking this incident as rather too funnily and cracking jokes all along and clicking pictures of us in masks. Now we were all in a mood for some more fun and hence reached Good Luck Café where Rejil ordered for ‘Dal’, with due respect for his stomach, while Midhun now a little bit more relaxed had Chicken. We all had a good time but Nishant and I kept on reminding them of the doc’s fears on infection.
