Aruna Shanbaug, the nurse who has been lying in a vegetative state for the past 42 years after she was brutally assaulted and raped by a hospital sweeper, is critical and on ventilator.
Senior medical officer KEM hospital Pravin Bangar said Ms. Shanbaug, is suffering from pneumonia. Her condition is said to be critical but stable. “She is in the Intensive Care Unit. The hospital is doing everything it can for her treatment,” Dr. Bangar said.
> Read: Supreme Court disallows friend's plea for mercy killing of vegetative Aruna
On a night in November 1973, Ms. Shanbaug who then worked as a junior nurse at the Kings Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, was brutally assaulted and raped by a wardboy-cum-sweeper of the hospital, Sohanlal Bharta Valmiki, after throttling her with a dog chain. The brutal assault cut off blood and oxygen supply to key parts of her brain. Ms. Shanbaug has been in a vegetative state since and confined to a bed at the KEM hospital where nurses and the hospital staff take care of her.
Euthanasia plea Ms. Shanbaug’s case had triggered a national debate on mercy killing. >In 2011, the Supreme Court responded to a plea for euthanasia filed by journalist Pinki Virani but turned down the mercy killing petition. In her petition, Ms. Virani, who penned the book Aruna’s Story , had urged the court to grant euthanasia arguing that the former nurse was “virtually a dead person.”
COMMents
SHARE