Mumbai: A nurse who went into coma after being raped 42 years ago, died on Monday. She was 68.

Aruna Shanbaug was in the Intensive Care unit of Mumbai’s King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital. Doctors had said a few days ago that Shanbaug was suffering from pneumonia and was on ventilator support.

She was raped in 1973 by a staff member at the hospital she worked. Shanbaug was only 26 years old and a junior nurse when she was assaulted and raped by a d cleaner Sohanlal Bharta Valmiki. Shanbaugh had scolded him for stealing food meant for stray animals adopted by the hospital.

She had just finished her shift, and was in the basement of the hospital changing before leaving for home. Her attacker had been lying in wait. He sodomized her and then strangled her with a dog chain, cutting supply of oxygen to her brain, which resulted in irreversible damage.

She was discovered in the basement 11 hours after she was attacked, blinded and paralyzed and with the iron chain around her neck.

From that day on, Aruna became a resident of the hospital. So thorough was the care she got over the four decades that she was bed-ridden that Shanbaug did not get bed sores, a fact noted by the Supreme Court in its landmark judgment of 2011, rejecting a petition for euthanasia.

”I was associated with her care for almost 10 years when I was working for KEM. Nurses would clean, feed, change her clothes, not mechanically. They would talk to her… While trying to clean her mouth, by chance she would bite a finger,” recalls Dr Pragna Pai, former Dean at KEM Hospital.

Aruna, she said, loved fish and mangoes.

The petition for euthanasia or mercy killing for Aruna became the focus of a national debate. Author Pinky Virani, who wrote the book ‘Aruna’s Story,’ filed the petition, arguing that keeping her alive her state violated her right to live with dignity.

But former and present staff members and nurses at KEM Hospital strongly opposed it.

They were the family that Aruna had no more. As she lay in hospital without sight or memory or even the ability to move her family abandoned her. An older sister, Shanta Nayak, too could not sustain visits to the hospital as the years went by.