Delhi: Inside India’s first heat stroke emergency room

“Early cooling saves lives. Every second counts,” says Dr Chauhan. A delay can either prove to be fatal or leave the patient bleeding, or with damaged kidneys and liver.

It is not difficult to fall ill in Delhi. Life is tough. A third of residents live in substandard and congested housing. The city’s 6,400-odd slums, home to more than a million households, lack adequate cooling and face seasonal livelihood crises. Men fall ill working outdoors; women fall sick after spending extended periods in kitchen settings with traditional stoves.

Green spaces are scarce. In the peak of summer, the city turns into a scorching furnace, trapped between the blazing heat from above and the searing ground below.

Anjana Kumari, the wife of a daily wage worker admitted at RHML with heat stroke, told The Indian Express , externalthat their slum hutment’s only fan wasn’t working due to a power cut. Her husband, exhausted from working all day on Monday, couldn’t sleep and later suffered seizures, vomiting, and diarrhoea. She rushed him to the hospital at night. “Doctors have told me he won’t be able to walk for some time and need a lot of care,” Ms Kumari said.

Those who work outdoors suffer the most. A large majority of respondents in a new Greenpeace survey, external on how heat impacts street vendors in Delhi reported health issues due to hot weather. Irritability was the most common (73.44%), followed by headaches, dehydration, sunburn, fatigue and muscle cramps. Most faced challenges accessing medical care due to lack of money.