Bengaluru: Craving for tea, 73-year-old sends hospital and chaiwallah into a tizzy

BENGALURU: A 73-year-old Covid-19 patient hankering for a cup of tea on Wednesday morning ventured out of a Mysuru Road private hospital where he’d been admitted, leaving the authorities, a nearby chaiwallah and his customers tense.
Nagarbhavi resident Guru (name changed) had been discharged from another private hospital on Tuesday night after testing positive for Covid-19.He waited in an ambulance for three hours before managing to get a bed in the Mysuru Road hospital, and asked the staff for a cup of tea around 5am.
When the tea did not arrive till 7.30am, Guru got restless. After a while, he pulled out the tubes inserted in his arm and wrist, got out of bed and walked over to a nearby tea stall outside.
As the elderly man was savouring his cuppa, another customer noticed the plaster on his hand and asked him what it was.
The senior citizen promptly replied: “I am a Covid-19 patient and have come here to have tea.”
“He said he was not even getting a cup of tea in the hospital. Seven customers who were sipping tea immediately dropped their glasses and took to their heels. They did not even pay me. I had to close my stall because of the elderly man,” rued Narayana LC, the tea seller.
Narayana realised the man had come from the hospital a few hundred metres away. The tea seller ran to the hospital, which rushed its staff to the spot to bring the patient back. Narayana, meanwhile, called the man’s kin on phone.
Around 8.05am, the hospital staff took the aged man back to his ward. A relative blamed it all on the hospital’s negligence. “My uncle could have infected many others. Had the hospital been more vigilant, this wouldn’t have happened,” he said.
The man was angry that he was made to wait for over eight hours while being shifted from one hospital to another, and had spent Rs 1.5 lakh so far but couldn’t get a cup of tea.
According to the relative, Guru complained of tiredness and diarrhoea on Sunday and was taken to a private hospital in Nagarbhavi. The officials asked the family to pay Rs 25,000 for admission and treatment. They also got Guru tested for Covid-19. On Tuesday afternoon, the result showed he was positive.
“The hospital billed us Rs 1.5 lakh and we were allowed to leave only after clearing it. We paid the amount and went to a government hospital in Malleswaram,” the relative said. The hospital said no beds were empty.
“My uncle waited in the ambulance for almost three hours as we haggled to get him admitted. He began to bleed from his nose but the hospital just gave us some cotton,” the relative said.
Finally, Guru’s kin managed to get a bed for him in the Mysuru Road hospital. “He was admitted at 1.30am. Since we were not allowed in, we went back home,” the relative added.