Earlier this year, doctors in a small Assam hospital fought the clock for 75 minutes and won.
Hotelier Sanjay Poddar, 59, collapsed inside Dibrugarh’s Apeksha Hospital after suffering an acute myocardial infarction—medical parlance for a massive heart attack. Before doctors could wheel him in for an angiogram, his heart stopped altogether. “The heart had gone into an absolute standstill,” recalls Dr Raja Roy, the intensivist on duty. “We started chest compressions—full CPR with ventilation—and revived him after about eight minutes. But he went into arrest again, and again. Each time we brought him back, the heart would stop.”
Resuscitation is rarely continued beyond 30 minutes, as the chances of meaningful recovery are “very remote”. In the waiting area, Poddar’s son Shubham, 31, watched the clock stretch into eternity. “His pulse was only there when they were pressing his chest; the moment they stopped, it flattened,” he recalls.
Yet the Apeksha team refused to stop. “My back was already pushed to the wall,” says Roy. “We had nothing to lose. The arrest was happening right in front of us—a witnessed arrest—which statistically gives a slightly better prognosis.” The team then did what was almost unheard of, especially in small-town hospitals—open the blocked artery, even with ongoing compressions.
Roy calls it a defining moment in his career. “Medicine is not just protocol; it is judgment and persistence,” he says. “When a team believes there is still a rhythm to find—even faint—you try. That’s what care means.”
When the team opened Poddar’s heart, what they found astonished them: the main coronary artery was 100 per cent blocked. As soon as the stent went in, the monitor began to beep with a steady rhythm. After 75 minutes of continuous CPR, Poddar’s heart was beating again.
Poddar spent 10 days in the ICU, and was then airlifted to Mumbai’s Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital for months of neuro-rehabilitation under Dr Abhishek Srivastava, who calls it “nothing short of a miracle”. But inside that small ICU in Dibrugarh, the miracle began with a team that refused to give up.
Poddar’s story is one among many that define India’s best hospitals—not only through their cutting-edge technology or success rates, but through the lives they have rebuilt. These are places where science meets spirit, where survival transforms into second chances. India’s top hospitals are rewriting what recovery looks like, and they are doing so with emotion and precision.
At P.D. Hinduja hospital, Mumbai, empathy, science and faith came together to save a man on the brink. When Giles Taites, 74, was brought in, his oxygen saturation had plummeted to 82. What followed was a 21-day battle that tested not only the limits of medicine, but also the perseverance of the medical staff.
Taites, who had long been under treatment for arthritis, developed an unusual, persistent cough for which he was rushed to Hinduja’s emergency department in March. Within hours, he was moved to the ICU. “By next morning, he had curled up like a prawn and was shivering. His oxygen had dropped to 71,” recalls his son Adrian.
The medical team initially suspected interstitial lung disease—a chronic, often irreversible lung condition. Yet, test after test came back negative. When nothing worked, the doctors opted for a bronchoalveolar lavage—a complex procedure in which fluid is inserted into the lungs and retrieved for analysis. They had to put him on the ventilator for that. But for over 10 days, he lay sedated, his breathing dependent on the ventilator. The family watched as costs spiralled. “We didn’t have insurance,” says Adrian. “In 21 days, we had spent nearly Rs16 lakh. Every day in the ICU was about Rs85,000.” They began to lose hope. “There was no improvement. He wasn’t getting worse either, but it was just... stagnant,” recalls Adrian. They were ready to withdraw life support but didn’t on the advice of pulmonologist Dr Lancelot Pinto.“He said, ‘Let’s give him some more time. I still believe he can make it,’” says Adrian.
Neurologist Dr Roop Gursahani even held a counselling session with the family. “They didn’t let us feel like we were alone or being unreasonable. They were fighting for him as much as we were,” says Adrian.
But as the situation worsened, and the lungs began to collapse further, another senior consultant reviewed his case and told the family gently: “His lungs have deteriorated. We have tried everything. Maybe he has another 48 hours.”
The family began preparing for the inevitable—calling relatives, alerting the church and even planning his funeral. “We had made peace with it,” Adrian says quietly. “My mother even called the parish priest. We gave him his final sacrament.”
Next morning though, the family woke up to a miracle. Adrian’s brother called him and said, “The ventilator is off—and dad is breathing on his own!” Within hours, Taites’s oxygen requirements dropped drastically. “From 75 per cent ventilator support, it went down to 30 per cent as his lungs had started functioning again,” says Adrian.
Within days, Taites was discharged. For the family, the experience has redefined trust in medicine. “It was empathy, not just expertise, that brought him back,” says Adrian. Today, months after the episode, his father is at home in Bandra—walking, talking and “dancing again”.
At the country’s leading tertiary hospitals such as AIIMS Delhi, Apollo Hospitals, Christian Medical College, Vellore, and Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, each ward carries its own epic of endurance. The hospital becomes a support system not just during treatment but for years beyond that.
Siddhi Bacche, mother of 18-year-old Sahil, turns emotional when she speaks about the role Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai has played in his life. He was diagnosed with blood cancer at just four-and-a-half years. “They did everything—not just with the treatment but they also supported him with his education,” she says. “They continue to support him in his rifle shooting national championships. They sowed the seeds of the sport in him, as they take all cancer survivor children to Moscow for games each year.” Shalini Jatia, officer in charge, ImPaCCT Foundation, paediatric oncology, Tata Memorial Centre, says that the foundation’s focus has always been on holistic care. “Our survivorship model extends far beyond cure, offering lifelong followup, access to medicines, counselling, education, skill-building and support in overcoming post-treatment challenges,” she says.
In a number of cases, it is the calm conviction of the medical experts and the “calculated risks” they take that lead to second chances for patients. Uma Sangameswaran, 74, a Palakkad-based retired English professor and Carnatic singer, first noticed what seemed like a tongue ulcer in early 2011. She dismissed it as a passing irritation, perhaps caused by the instant coffee she had been gulping down during the condolence visits after her mother’s death. “I didn’t bother about it for two months,” she recalls. But then she visited her family doctor for severe leg pain, and casually mentioned the ulcer to him. He asked her to get checked immediately.
Sangameswaran was referred to a hospital in Palakkad, where a biopsy threw up a diagnosis of cancer. She was advised to undergo surgery, followed by radiation therapy. “I asked the doctor about my speech and singing ability,” she says softly. “He said both would be affected because they would have to chop off a part of my tongue.”
For Sangameswaran, that was unthinkable. “Music is my life. I have been trained in Carnatic music,” she says. “I give spiritual discourses, and I always end them with bhajans—my audience would repeat after me. Without a tongue, what would I do?”
That is when Sangameswaran consulted Dr Subramania Iyer, chairman, head and neck surgery/plastic and reconstructive surgery, Amrita Hospitals in Kochi. “He had actually stayed back after hours for me,” she remembers. He told her that her cancer was progressing to stage two but assured her that he could operate on her tongue and reconstruct it. The term reconstruct was unfamiliar to her. “I couldn’t comprehend it fully, but there was a calm confidence in his voice.” Her tongue was reconstructed using tissue from her left arm. The recovery, which took almost a year, was gruelling and the pain excruciating. Looking back, Sangameswaran credits Iyer not just with saving her life, but also her voice. “He didn’t just remove my cancer; he gave me back my ability to speak, to sing and to live with dignity,” she tells THE WEEK from Belgium, where she now lives with her son and his family.
Beyond empathy and care, medical advancements and breakthroughs that were considered impossible earlier have now transformed treatment in unimaginable ways. Take the case of Sangameswaran. “To me, her case represents one of the most remarkable achievements of modern reconstructive microsurgery in head and neck cancer. You could call it a prime example of how far we have come,” says Iyer.
Likewise, two years ago at Indraprastha Apollo hospital in Delhi, Anshika, 8, underwent a transplant that “wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago”. Anshika was diagnosed with Wilson’s disease, a rare genetic disorder that affects copper metabolism. “We all consume copper through our diet,” explains group medical director and senior paediatric gastroenterologist Dr Anupam Sibal, “but because of an inherited defect, the body fails to process it. Over time, this copper starts accumulating in different organs, most often in the liver.”
In children, this buildup can be devastating. It damages the liver and causes cirrhosis. The blood vessels in the food pipe swell and can burst, leading to bleeding. The abdomen bloats, jaundice develops and, in advanced cases, copper seeps into the brain, sending the patient into coma. The symptoms usually show up suddenly once the child reaches the age of seven or eight.
Anshika was brought into the hospital with acute liver failure, a life-threatening emergency. She was put on ventilator support, and started on plasma exchange therapy to reduce toxins affecting her brain and on dialysis to control brain swelling. Dr Neerav Goyal, head of liver transplant, describes those few days as “a race against time”. “In such cases, you get just 72 to 96 hours to perform a liver transplant,” he says. “Beyond that, the survival chances are minimal.”
Moreover, her mother, the only suitable donor, had an incompatible blood group. “The child was blood group B, and the mother AB—what we call an ABO-incompatible transplant. Even under normal circumstances, acute liver failure is challenging. But to perform an ABO-incompatible transplant in that emergency window—that’s an entirely different level of risk,” says Goyal. The team had no option but to improvise. “We had to first reduce the antibodies in the child’s system against the mother’s blood group through multiple plasma exchanges,” recalls Goyal. “Normally, we give a drug called Rituximab that suppresses those antibodies, but it takes seven to 14 days to act. We didn’t have that time. So we gave it just 12 hours before the transplant, after bringing down the antibody levels artificially.” The surgery was successful.
“A few years ago, performing an ABO-incompatible emergency transplant like this simply wouldn’t have been possible,” says Goyal. “What made it feasible were advancements in technology—plasma exchange systems, the availability of newer immunosuppressive drugs and a better understanding of how to manage incompatible transplants. If this had happened 10 years ago, the child likely wouldn’t have survived.”
For Sibal, Anshika’s case is “just one example of the complexity of transplants we now do”. “Our programme has crossed 5,000 liver transplants—the first in the country to reach that milestone,” he says. “We performed India’s first liver transplant back in November 1998 at Apollo Delhi, in a 20-month-old baby who is now a doctor himself.”
Another example is of a procedure that repaired a failing heart without opening the chest. A 73-year-old man from Delhi, already living with a fragile heart and a history of bypass surgery, came in with severe breathlessness and heart failure. Another surgery was unthinkable. His heart was leaking badly, blood was flowing back through the mitral valve each time it tried doing its job and his lungs were under crushing pressure. But at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, a team of cardiologists and cardiac surgeons offered something different. “He was far too high-risk for a conventional operation,” says Dr Sai Satish, clinical lead for transcatheter heart valve therapies, Apollo Hospitals Group. “That’s why we chose the MitraClip—a transcatheter repair system that allows us to fix the valve through a small puncture in the leg.”
Using real-time imaging, doctors thread a catheter up through a vein into the heart, and deploy a tiny clip that grasps the faulty valve leaflets, closing the leak instantly. The technique, known as Transcatheter Mitral Valve Repair, spares patients the trauma and long recovery of open-heart surgery.
“It’s like mending a tear in fabric without opening the whole garment,” explains Dr Varun Bansal, senior consultant, cardiothoracic and vascular surgery.
For the patient, the difference was immediate. Within hours of the procedure, his breathing eased, his oxygen levels normalised, and he was off the ventilator in four hours. “He was discharged within 48 hours,” says Dr B.N. Das, chief cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon at Apollo.
Every patient story has a parallel one, that of parents who sleep on benches outside ICUs, of siblings who stand in endless queues for blood donation, of spouses who hold on to hope in waiting rooms that blur night and day. At AIIMS Delhi, the caregiver shelters outside the main complex are now being redesigned with shaded areas, food counters and counselling kiosks for families who travel from afar. CMC Vellore runs programmes where trained volunteers help families navigate hospital procedures and accommodation. This is indicative of how hospitals believe that healing is not limited to the person on the bed, rather emotional recovery is collective and it begins when the family feels supported.
Medicine saves lives. But what people do with that second life is where the real story begins. Shreya Siddanagowder, 27, underwent a double hand transplant about eight years ago and now lives a successful, independent life. In 2016, she was 18, and had just begun her engineering degree when she met with an accident. She was travelling from her Pune home back to college in Manipal when her bus overturned and skidded along the road for nearly 100m. “The friction between metal and road tore through the vehicle and through my body,” she says. When she woke up in the hospital, she was shocked to find that she had lost both her forearms. “The physical pain was one thing, but it was the mental helplessness that broke me. I had to take a break from college. I didn’t know what to do, or what my life could look like any more,” she tells THE WEEK.
She found hope in Iyer, who had already performed three successful hand transplants by then. By August 2017, she was ready for surgery. “The team at Amrita not only gave me new hands but, in many ways, gave me my life back,” she says. “Rehabilitation was hard—a year and a half of daily exercises, physiotherapy and learning to trust these hands as my own. But slowly, they began to move, respond and feel. And with every small motion—grasping a cup, buttoning a shirt—I regained a little bit of who I used to be.”
After the surgery, she decided to pursue economics instead of engineering and later did an MBA from IIM Calcutta. Today, she lives alone in Mumbai and works as a consultant. She now sees her life in two halves: before the accident and after—both versions existing in harmony, stitched together by resilience and modern medicine.
Then there is Priyanka Kharwe’s long fight with avascular necrosis, a condition in which a portion of bone loses its blood supply, collapses and eventually crumbles. For three years, every step felt like a trap. At first the pain was small, something she let slide. Then it became sharp and constant, and woke her from sleep. She limped. Crutches became her companion. Tasks most people take for granted—getting up, walking to the toilet, leaving the house—turned into decisions she dreaded. She was in her early 30s and had just got married. “It was very, very depressing.... the worst year of my life,” she recalls. “As your bone starts rubbing against your other bone, it becomes very, very painful. I did not want to waste my young years in pain.”
Kharwe consulted Dr Pradeep Bhosale, principal director, robotic joint replacement, hip and knee surgery, Nanavati Max Super Speciality Hospital, Mumbai, who recommended robotic hip replacement with a dual-mobility implant—a choice aimed at maximising range of motion and reducing the risk of dislocation in a young, active patient. On October 22, 2024, she underwent the surgery and within three months could walk unassisted. A year on, she recently went on a trek for 12km. “I have got a new lease on life. I owe my life to him (Dr Bhosale),” she says.
And then there are cases that make even medical experts marvel. Take Aafiya, now 11. When she arrived at the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai in early 2023, Dr Santanu Sen, consultant, paediatric haemato-oncology, wasn’t sure she would make it through the week, let alone the year. “She beat the odds about five times in her life,” he says. “There were at least a couple of occasions when we ourselves were convinced that she may not survive the next few days. But today, I see her smiling and happy—it’s a complete miracle,” he says.
Aafiya had been diagnosed with aplastic anaemia, a rare, life-threatening condition in which the bone marrow stops producing blood cells. “Your body stops making red cells, white cells and platelets,” Sen explains. “So, you need regular blood transfusions every three to four weeks, and platelet transfusions two to three times a week. You are constantly at risk of bleeding and infection. The only curative option is a bone marrow transplant, and that must be done as soon as possible.”
That is easier said than done in India. By the time Aafiya came to Sen, she was fighting a severe pseudomonas bacterial infection—one that simply refused to respond to antibiotics. “She was sinking before our eyes,” recalls Sen. “Nothing was working. And we realised that if we waited for her infection to settle before transplanting, she would die. So, we had to take a very risky, balanced decision—to go ahead with the transplant even with an active infection.”
Going into a transplant in such a state is “a high-risk proposition”. The patient receives seven to 10 days of aggressive chemotherapy, which wipes out all remaining bone marrow and renders them even more vulnerable to infections. “But she had no choice,” says Sen. “This was her only shot at life.”
Luckily, Aafiya found a donor in her sister, and the transplant went ahead. After about six weeks, she went home. But three months after discharge, she returned with a virulent tuberculosis infection—one so aggressive that it was “almost eating her from inside”. And once that stabilised, she came back in December 2023 with mucormycosis, the deadly ‘black fungus’ that had claimed countless lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The MRI showed the infection had destroyed her eye, spread to the base of the brain, the jaw and the ear. “When our surgeons opened her up, everything was a mess,” says Sen. “The conventional approach would have meant removing half her face—her eye, upper jaw and part of her forehead. For a pretty little girl of nine, that was unimaginable.” With surgery ruled out, the doctors took an uncharted path. “We decided to start her on a novel combination of three antifungal drugs—something nobody had really done before,” he says. “We had nothing to lose. Why not go all out and give her every possible chance?” To everyone’s surprise, the treatment began to show results. “None of us thought she would survive,” says Sen. “We just thought we will make her comfortable.”
Then, two months later, a video arrived from Aafiya’s father. The little girl was playing in her room. Laughing. Alive. Her father still sends Sen photos and short videos every few months.
Best hospitals are also places where caregivers form strong emotional bonds with their patients, often transforming the doctor-patient equation. At AIIMS Rishikesh, Dr Amit Sehrawat, associate professor, medical oncology, still remembers the first time he met the little boy who would become one of his unforgettable patients. “He was just five years old when I met him—one of the most active, notorious kids I have ever seen,” says Sehrawat. “He used to come running into my OPD, straight to my table, open my drawer and grab chocolates. Even before saying hello, he would ask for a second one! Whenever he was around, you didn’t need to look for him—you’d know from the laughter and commotion in the room.”
But behind the boy’s cheerful mischief was a story of extreme hardship. The boy was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, an aggressive soft tissue cancer. “It is a very aggressive malignancy, but in children, it is also curable if you follow international treatment protocols,” explains Sehrawat. “His social support was very poor. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother was frail, undernourished and struggling with gynaecological problems. Sometimes she was too unwell to bring him, and a neighbour would accompany the child instead.” Despite her frailty, the mother “was very motivated” and “never missed his treatment unless she was hospitalised herself”.
The family’s economic situation was dire, but help came through CanKids, an NGO that assisted with travel, investigations and even free medications when their Ayushman Bharat card couldn’t be activated. “They provided logistical and financial support, and most important, a child psychologist who helped the mother understand the long journey ahead,” says Sehrawat.
The boy had a relapse, but even in recurrence, their intent was curative, not palliative. “A relapse usually means Stage IV cancer. Theoretically, survival chances fall to around 20 per cent at five years,” explains Sehrawat. “But we decided to aim for cure. We designed a specific, precision-based chemotherapy protocol, keeping in mind his malnourished state and fragile condition.”
For Sehrawat, treating paediatric cancer isn’t just about medical science, it is about emotional and social care. “In paediatric oncology, you don’t just treat the child,” he says. “The child doesn’t understand the magnitude of what’s happening. You have to treat the entire family.” That philosophy guided every part of the boy’s care. “When his mother had heavy menstrual bleeding, we even got her admitted at AIIMS for treatment,” he recalls. “Because if she collapsed, the whole system of support for the boy would fall apart. We had to look after both of them.”
After three relentless years—multiple sessions of chemotherapy, surgeries, nutritional rehabilitation and counselling—the little boy finally beat the odds.
For Sehrawat, it is not just a success story; it is a reminder of what compassionate, community-based medicine can achieve.