Mumbai, Nurse Aruna Shanbaug, the former nurse at KEM
Hospital here who was brutally sexually assaulted by a ward boy at the facility
42 years ago and had been lying in a vegetative state ever since, passed away
today.
The
66-year-old was battling a serious bout of pneumonia and was on ventilator
support, King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital sources said. She was in the
medical ICU of the hospital located in Parel area of Mumbai.
Shanbaug was rushed out of the tiny room attached to ward
number 4 that had been her home for four decades on Tuesday, after nurses
attending to her saw she had difficulty in breathing. She was taken to the
medical ICU and started on antibiotics. Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse in King Edward
Medical College, was brutally raped by a sweeper in the hospital in 1973 and
since then has been in a permanent vegetative state, with her every need looked
after by the hospital nurses.
In March 2011, the Supreme Court had rejected a petition
filed by former journalist and author Pinki Virani, who had sought mercy
killing (euthanasia) for Aruna Shanbaug, which the KEM hospital’s management
and nursing staff had opposed.
Virani
had narrated the story of the ailing nurse in her 1998 non-fiction book called
‘Aruna’s Story’, while Duttakumar Desai wrote the Marathi play, ‘Katha
Arunachi’ in 1994-95, which was staged under director Vinay Apte in 2002. (Source- www.newsroompost.com)
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