Image: Visiting a young boy at NITOR Hospital
A memorable experience from being a patient at a government hospital in Dhaka.
We don’t just live through our experiences—we can learn from them and about other people. Some of these experiences can be unforgettable, and they influence our lives in different ways.
Here is my story:
After I fell and broke my arm in Dhaka, I went to see two different orthopaedics. As their opinion regarding performing an operation or not differed, I decided to go to NITOR (National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopaedic Rehabilitation), a government orthopaedic hospital in Dhaka. I was familiar with it after working in the NGO sector for many years.
Entering there, it seemed like every corner were occupied: Long queues stretched through the corridors. Patients waited patiently on benches, while others rested on the floor. Relatives carried bags, blankets, and food. Vendors moved through the crowd selling tea, snacks, and even sleeping mats. To someone unfamiliar with such an environment, the hospital might have appeared chaotic. Yet beneath the apparent disorder, things seemed to function well.
The admission procedure went smooth, and I was taken to the area were patients were waiting for their operation. I realized that the atmosphere here was very different from what it would be in a hospital in my home country Norway. There, people waiting in hospitals generally keep to themselves. Personal questions are often considered intrusive.
In the crowded wards of NITOR, human connection seemed as immediate as it was necessary. Suffering had dissolved the usual distance between strangers; people who had never met spoke with an effortless warmth and familiarity. They shared stories, offered quiet advice, and passed around words of encouragement, bound together by circumstances no one would choose.
Almost everyone had a long journey behind them. Many had travelled for days from distant districts to reach Dhaka. To afford the trip, some had sold small plots of land or taken high-interest loans; others had stayed home for months, waiting for money that never came while their conditions worsened. A few spoke quietly of months lost to misdiagnoses and botched procedures before finally arriving here.
As they spoke, calloused hands held out cheap, cracked smartphones. On the tiny, bright screens were photographs of injuries so severe—crushed limbs, exposed hardware, raw wounds—that I had to turn my eyes away.
Listening to them, it became clear that for many, physical pain was only half the burden. The real dread was financial. Would they need an orthopaedic implant they couldn’t afford? If they couldn’t walk, who would pay next month’s rent? If they lost their livelihood, how would their families eat? In these halls, fear was measured not just in bones that wouldn’t heal, but in futures slipping away.
Maybe some of the patients realized that these detailed stories they were sharing, gave me some kind of discomfort, so they shifted the focus to me and my situation:
“Ohoh, you don’t have any of your own family here? Can’t your children come from “bidesh” to take care of you? They should… That I was talking with my kids often, was not good enough for “my new friends”: My grown up kids were not here with me in the hospital, and would not be at my place when I came home or could not visit me in the near future. I became the focus of sympathetic attention; some of them really felt sorry for me. Shaking their heads in disbelief, making smacking sounds and expressed their concern; bidesh people were really strange…
Not surprisingly, some of the staff had some questions for me exceeding the standard questions of a regular patient, and I was perfectly ok with that as the atmosphere were very friendly. I did not realize that maybe some of them thought my choice of operation in a government hospital was related to financial insufficiency, before one of them asked me if I lived in one of the poorer areas of Dhaka.
A few days after the operation, I went for x ray and check-up, and I was glad to hear that the bones were aligned. After 6 weeks, the external fixation was removed, and I could start attending physiotherapy and hand exercise according to the doctor’s advice.
The thought of my hand would not improve; because of maybe some mistakes during the operation never crossed my mind. However, some persons in Dhaka, who would only take service from the most expensive hospitals in Dhaka, or even going outside the country for treatment, shared their sceptical opinions. I realized to my own disappointment, how their comments affected me and my confidence regarding my initial decision of being operated at a government hospital. A few months after the operation, I was going to Norway to visit family and friends and I decided get an appointment with an orthopaedist at the hospital there.
The conclusion after seeing an orthopaedics was that the operation itself was correct and necessary, as plaster would not have been sufficient, and the use of external fixation had been necessary as well.
Thinking back at my experience from the hospital in Dhaka, I came to think about a powerful Norwegian poem, “You must not sleep” that the Norwegian poet Arnulf Øverland, wrote and the most famous verse: “You must not endure so terribly well the injustice that does not affect yourself! I cry with the very last breath of my voice: You are not allowed to go about and forget!“
I realized, that I could not or should not forget about these poor patients who had given me such a valuable and memorable insight in their lives, and that I now have a job to do…