Hands that heal, blows they bear

Hospitals are not sacred because of their architecture; their sanctity springs from something infinitely more fragile presence. It is the presence of those who step inside each day, fully aware that they might fail, break, or be blamed. Presence endures like a trembling candle in a storm, burning on even when it feels hopeless or unsafe.

Day after day, doctors, nurses, and attendants return to wards steeped in grief and uncertainty. They do not come with promises of miracles or cures but with a quiet, unwavering commitment to witness, to ease, and to stand beside suffering. In recent weeks, even that painstaking promise has started to unravel—like the last threads holding together a garment long worn by loss.

At Government Medical College in Jammu, a young resident doctor was assaulted in the very heart of resuscitation by an attendant consumed by rage. One moment, she pressed on a fading chest, drawing life back with her bare hands; the next, she shielded herself from blows and kicks in the abdomen while her hands were still trembling with the rhythm of CPR. Just days later, at SMHS Hospital in Srinagar, another resident physician faced violence during an overnight vigil, desperately trying to keep a dying patient tethered to this world.

These are not isolated events. They are aftershocks of a growing epidemic: violence against healthcare workers in our country. In each case, the families did not strike out from anger over neglect or malpractice, but because helplessness had no gentler outlet. But when grief turns violent, it does not comfort; it is a wildfire, scorching the hands that dare to reach out and help.

We, as healthcare workers, have never sought applause. But we never imagined we would need armor against those we serve.

Violence against healthcare workers is not merely a physical threat; it threatens the very soul of medicine. It shreds the silent thread linking patient and healer in mutual vulnerability. It swaps trust for suspicion, drowns presence in fear, and saps medicine of its meaning. Another young doctor hesitates with every attack—not about how to treat, but whether to even show up. Should I speak? Should I stay? Will I return home, or will fear swallow me whole?

Once a symbol of quiet promise, the white coat now feels thin—caught between the world’s hopes and doubts, made fragile by rumor and anger. Healers tread these halls with care, their words gentle and measured, seeking to comfort while always wary, their silence a small shield.

Beyond these walls, sorrow and longing ripple through families, their pain and hope woven together beneath life’s uncertainty. In times when trust wears thin, suspicion can settle everywhere, linking patient and caregiver in a silent struggle. Perhaps, in facing this together, we remember: it is our shared hope—and pain—that binds us, making us stronger despite all that threatens to divide.

As Erich Segal wrote in “Doctors,” the physician’s true art is not in conquering death, but in accompanying the patient through it—with dignity, presence, and grace. We are not magicians who rule over mortality. We are just flawed humans, as breakable as those we serve. We watch our own loved ones die in our arms. We have failed to save those we would give our lives to protect. So why, when we choose to stay with your dying, are we your enemy? Why do you think we did not try or care when our hearts carry the ashes of every loss?

We did not flee when the monitors stopped. We stayed, and perhaps that is all we can offer: to stand like a candle in the wind, beside the dying, when even our science kneels before fate.

But staying now feels perilous. And when even the simple act of being present becomes a gamble, what will become of medicine if its healers are driven away not by disease, but by fear?

We need urgent, lasting reform. Laws that protect us must be enforced, not just drafted. Assaulting a healer must carry real consequences. Hospitals must invest in genuine security—not walls that divide us, but safeguards that foster trust. Emotional and communication training must be woven into every stitch of medical education. Doctors must learn not only to suture, but to listen—to pain, silence, and rage—like tuning an instrument to the frequencies of human need. The media must abandon the lazy impulse to cast physicians as either villains or saviors. We are neither. We are ordinary people navigating the wild space between life and loss.

But laws alone will not save us. What must change is the culture of blame. We must learn to separate grief from vengeance, and loss from accusation. Medicine is not a vending machine dispensing certainty—it is a fragile alliance, a bridge stretched across ever-shifting waters.

There is a poem I keep close during difficult nights. It has no title. It quietly says:

We are not sent to conquer death,

But to keep watch beside it.

Not to calm the tide,

But to hold the shore from vanishing.

In the end, the soul remembers

Not who healed it—

But who stayed?

What happened in Jammu and Srinagar was not merely an attack on two doctors. It was an attack on that final pledge—that when everything else fails, someone will remain at the bedside, a lighthouse steady in the blackest night.

And the miracle, even now, is that so many still do. Residents show up with red eyes and quiet courage. Nurses risk fresh wounds to cradle a stranger’s grief. Surgeons speak gently, even when the cumulative weight of loss splinters their spirits.

This is not mere resilience. This is hope—raw, human, obstinate, flickering but never fully extinguished.

And so, even as the world sometimes answers our outstretched hands with fists and fury, still we remain—each healer a trembling lantern, holding a circle of light against the encroaching dark. If we allow that glow to be snuffed out by fear, medicine becomes a house with no lamp in the window—impossible to find, trust, or forsaken when most needed. To protect those lanterns is to preserve the hope that, no matter how stormy the night, someone will always keep the light burning, for all of us.

Author is a Consultant Interventional Cardiologist, GMC Anantnag