Introduction
Dr Guruprasad Kaginele is a Physician by profession. He is an emergency medicine physician in Rochester, Minnesota. He has been in practice for more than 20 years.
Dr. Guruprasad is also an acclaimed writer in Kannada with seven Kannada literary works to his credit. His latest work ‘Hijab’ was published in 2017.
He spoke to Samvada World on the occasion of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas.
Work during Corona
As an emergency medicine physician, Dr Guruprasad is a frontline worker in the fight against COVID in the US. He has attended to hundreds of Corona infected patients during the last 7-8 months. His relentless work has saved many lives and families.
In the early days of COVID, as the information about the disease was sparse, testing and PPE were not readily available, he and his staff had to conserve the PPE and sometimes work with bare minimum staff in order to keep the exposure minimum. This posed a special challenge. Besides, Dr Guruprasad says that attending to a much educated and affluent populace has its own challenges as the demand for testing and treating from the patients are huge.
Since the clinical spectrum of COVID is so broad, they couldn’t afford to take chance with any patients walking in to the department. They had to attend to each patient in the Emergency Department as if they were treating a COVID patient. This was of critical importance to both the hospital staff and the patients.
From handling their regular loads of patients to attending to those who were very sick with COVID, Dr Guruprasad has served during one the most challenging periods of a doctor’s life. There is a misconception that only old and sick patients are susceptible to severe disease due to COVID as I have seen even young and teenagers losing lives and limbs due to COVID, says Dr Guruprasad.
Biggest Challenge faced
The biggest challenge faced was in the initial days as many things were unsettling- like thinking about protecting themselves before attending the sickest patients in extremis. This was against every medical instincts. To conserve the PPE, they had to use their discretion as to who needs the maximum PPE and most skilled staff. To manage this with the limited resources was a challenge, Dr Guruprasad says. The US too had challenges to provide COVID tests to the citizens at the earliest which might have resulted in the spreading of the virus.
This is a common phenomenon in any pandemic. Since none of us have faced this in our lives we learnt as we treated says Dr Guruprasad just as people elsewhere in the world. The challenges the pandemic pose are drastically different which the hospitals were yet to scale up to.
At times, the ambulances rushed in one after the other with COVID patients, that the medical staff did not even have time to change over to new PPE suits between the patients. Changing into a new PPE suit was required so that the doctors themselves do not become the carriers of the virus while attending different patients. Though this was a medical and moral dilemma for Dr Guruprasad and team, they had to take care of the patients despite the shortage of suits.
“Sometimes we had to take a call as to changing into new suit or save lives and we did the best we can”, says Dr Guruprasad. His decision to choose the former has today resulted in saving innumerable lives and livelihoods in the USA.
Responsibility as a immigrant physician
“The prime responsibility as a immigrant physician is to educate my own community as some of them look up to me as their primary source of information. This I have done as a friend more than a physican”, says Dr. Guruprasad. The responsibility is further augmented as he is a writer too along with being a physician.
It is also his duty to educate others as a citizen of the country, he says.
Significance of Pravasi Bharatiya Divas
Man is a social animal and has to meet, talk and interact with other people. But we are living in precarious times when we haven’t met people for months together. Many in the US have not seen their families in India due to the pandemic. Have heard of cases where people had to say the final goodbye to family members in India without being able to travel due to pandemic, says Dr Guruprasad.
Doctors too have not been able to live with their families like the way they used to before the pandemic due to their work and initial worries about spreading the virus to their family members. Guruprasad didn’t eat, sleep or socialize with his family for at least first 3 months when the pandemic hit. It is in such a scenario and after having gone through so much in the last year, we have learnt to appreciate the value of family more, says Dr Guruprasad.
World is getting polarized and the US is also not bereft of it. But during such pandemic we will appreciate and realize that we all are humans and differences don’t matter. Dr Guruprasad says that it is people who make the country and if they have a good relationship, the countries will also be friendly. We have to assimilate in the country we live in. As immigrants, we always gain something by giving something to the society we live in, he concludes.
Dr. Niranjan B Poojar 
Balaji Subramanian