Paresh Rawal recalls doctor telling him to ‘pull the plug’ when mother was in a coma: ‘You’re prolonging her death’

Recalling his mother’s accident, he continued, “When my mother fell down, she was in a coma for 12 days. The doctor who treated her was a good friend. I asked him what we should do. He told me, ‘Paresh, she’s on life support. Even if she wakes up, she will not recognise anybody. She’s old, she might not survive the surgery. Her brain has been injured. By waiting, you’re not extending her life, you’re prolonging her death. Pull the plug. This is practical, these are the facts.'”

He added, “But she loved us so much, she didn’t put us in the position where we’d have to pull the plug. She got a heart attack and died.” He said that he was spared the torturous guilt of having to spend the rest of his life wondering if he could have saved her had he waited another day, or two.

The actor said that he was in Sri Lanka at the time, shooting for a film. And before leaving, when he was filling out a form making arrangements for his mother’s potential death in his absence, he started crying midway through. “What right do I have to make this decision for someone who has given me life?” he asked.

In an interview with The Times of India in 2011, he said that he was shooting for the film Ready at the time, and thanked Salman Khan for arranging for his travel back to Mumbai.