The Girl In The Elevator: Dr Sana Usman

I didn’t actually talk to her during my five years of med school. Only saw her occasionally, and noticed her even more infrequently; but those who did, lost her this morning of 9th October 2012. Her death was not due to natural causes. Her death was also not an accident. Her death was no less than a killing. It was a testimonial to our government’s efficiency. And her killers were no other than the administrative and maintenance departments of Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center (JPMC).

Her name was Dr. Sana Usman and she was my batch mate in Sindh Medical College. We had only just graduated in March and it has been 5 months since we have started our House Job in JPMC; one of the largest federal government hospital in Pakistan.  

For more than one week she was on ventilatory and cardiac support in the Surgical ICU of JPMC. Her only mistake was that she used the elevators in the Nephrology department. Elevators that had gaping holes in its doors, where there should have been glass. It was in those gaps in which her dopatta got stuck and as the elevator moved, it strangulated her. In her effort to free herself her arm was twisted behind her back and inside the open window of the door. After considerable delay she was “rescued” from the elevator and brought to JPMC’s emergency department on a stretcher that was pushed on the road as fast as it could go.

 She was declared dead in ER before she was resuscitated and her heart restarted. It took more than 15minutes of CPR, enough for her brain to be permanently damaged because of lack of oxygen. From there, she was shifted to the Surgical ICU. But all of this was to no avail. It only brought 9 days of false hope to Sana’s family and to us.

Her death has been a shocking eye opener for me at least. What kind of a working environment are we doctors in?  Where there is no guarantee of our lives, where I doubt whether we’ll all even come out alive of this mandatory one year training or not? Where there is occasional exchange of gun fire and bomb threats (read explosions) in its premises including the ER, where the looters on lose can anytime snatch you of your valuables or better yet sneak into sleeping female doctors on call room and steal from their bedside and where perverts strut around with their pants down assaulting doctors sexually...

We doctors have been working here for 5 months WITHOUT a single months’ salary being paid. That’s what the late Dr. Sana Usman said to her sister a day before the fatal accident that she was a financial burden on her parents even though she was a working woman.

I beg to you, to the President of Pakistan and to the Director of JPMC don’t let more of us die in vain. Let her death be a catalyst for change, a change for the better and for the good.

By: Dr. Misha Tanveer (House Officer, JPMC)