From glory to PR nightmare: What the Eman Ahmed episode teaches us
What will you possibly do when you are in the midst of a media spectacle, your private moments as a chronic patient up for daily consumption of millions of strangers? You are helpless, you lie immobile on your bed, a tube through your nose, your body half paralysed, your systems revolting against your soul with an acute diabetes, insomnia, obesity and riveting convulsions.
You may want to shoo away a reporter, turn your face away from blinding camera lights, but you just can’t as illness keeps you numb and vulnerable.
You are Eman Ahmed, 37, reeling under the weight of the World’s Heaviest Woman title. You came to Mumbai because your family believed in a doctor who would perform a miracle on you, reduce your weight, help you move around, be a normal human being – possibly live long, be less of a burden on your relatives who find it really hard to fund your treatment.
But your mother and your sister did not realise the public relations quagmire they were driving you into, aided by the greed of doctors who, under the cover of giving publicity to India as a medical tourism destination, were actually giving themselves a badge of honour – in the hope of a future Padma, perhaps.
Even if one forgets all of Eman’s sister Shaima’s allegations that her sister is worse off than what she was earlier – she gets too many convulsions, is still hypertensive and can’t swallow food – the whole episode of this hapless patient from Egypt smacks of a high-profile PR exercise gone horribly wrong, invading a patient’s privacy to realms beyond the imaginable.
The first time I saw Eman as some sort of cargo being offloaded from an airplane at Mumbai airport in a local daily, it evoked some curiosity. Soon, the plight of the lady took a back seat, with portraits of the doctor Muffazal Lakdawala posing with her and her sister coming to the fore.
It was the doctor and the hospital that then began to be written about. One report even said that there were issues in converting a section of the hospital canteen into a makeshift cabin for Eman, as someone protested saying the land was actually a cemetery!
But who would go into such details, when all one was to laud was this huge philanthropic work of the hospital, which accorded her crores of rupees worth of treatment, which was also partly crowd-funded? From 500kgs, her weight drops to less than 200 in a month, we are told, and we believed.
Until one day, Shaima cried foul, and spilled the beans on her sister’s treatment. One media firm, which ran a big story on her plight, then ran another story which quoted a bariatric (weight loss) surgeon saying such a patient can only lose 10 per cent weight in a month.
Does that mean all Eman lost was just 50kg and not 300 as claimed? No one knows, and neither do we need to. We don’t want poor Eman to be put through a new “weighing” harassment.
And that brings us back to the point of privacy. If there is one big nosedive by India in medical tourism rankings because of this incident, it will be in patient privacy. The Saifee Hospital, which treated her, has claimed that they have documented evidence that Eman’s family agreed to the media jamboree.
Many photo shoots, doctor and sister interviews, and - horror of horrors – one music video shoot with the patient were conducted. All ending in a media disaster. As she flew to Abu Dhabi from Mumbai, more questions remain.
What is the actual status of her health? How will she fare at the new hospital? How accountable is Saifee Hospital in the entire episode? Now that the onus of treating Eman has shifted to a new hospital and a set of doctors, can the former doctors and hospital be exonerated from all blame?
But these are technical questions. The larger one is moral.
Was it right to expose a patient to an everyday media blitzkrieg? Was it proper for her family to agree so? Were they not told the extent of media coverage upfront? What was the doctor thinking when he posed for scores of photographs with the media? Fame? Glory? Or was he really trying to help?
No one knows.
Eman, unfortunately, who suffered this all, and who really knows what went on, sadly can’t tell us all that.
Wishing this poor sister of ours a speedy recovery...