The child that refused to die

The child that refused to die

By Prakash Subbarao

There aren’t many times in our lives that we get to see God or feel his hand. This story which is about to unfold before you is one time that I saw God’s hand touching a child. Though he was in a very bad condition, and all the doctors had written him off, he refused to die. Whatever was necessary to keep him alive happened. Just like that. It was truly a miracle.

This is a true story. It happened in the late 1980’s. The names of the people have been changed, though.

I lived in those days in B.T.M. Layout, in a colony called AICOBONAGAR, in South Bangalore, India. The colony consisted of many independent bungalows clustered near one another. The colony was very new…….. so new that corporation water hadn’t still started flowing into the houses; we had a person deliver water to us every now and then in tractor powered tanker.

Because of the non-availability of water, not many people stayed there. The few people who lived there knew each other and many a friendship blossomed.

I stayed in a cottage that was on a corner plot. Opposite our cottage lived a bank manager. Diagonally opposite us lived Ramya and Mohan. Mohan worked for a two wheeler manufacturer; Ramya was a home maker.

They had a son, a little lad named Shankar. He was around three years old and had just started going to a nearby pre-nursery school. He was a bubbly little boy with a lovely smile, always running or cycling in front of his house. An ayah (an Indian nursemaid who looks after children) used to take him to the nursery; it was a fifteen minute walk from their place. At around noon she used to go to fetch him back.

They had to walk along the ring road. It was a new road back then, having just been laid, and there wasn’t much traffic.

One day the boy and his ayah were walking back home after school when he suddenly spied his classmate on the other side of the road. He screamed in delight at the sight of his friend and ran across the road to meet him. Before the ayah could react, a jeep hit the child. It all happened in an instant. The boy was thrown about ten feet away due to the force of the impact and lay motionless on the road, bleeding from a head injury.

The ayah was in shock.

The jeep belonged to the excise department and its occupants were all officers of the department. They immediately decided that to leave the boy there unattended would be certain death for him. They scooped him up and rushed him to the Sanjay Gandhi hospital in Jayanagar. It was around 12.30 pm.

That day I had applied for leave and hence had the day off. I woke late and had a late breakfast. I had just finished shaving when I heard the door bell pealing insistently. I wonder who is continuously ringing the bell, I thought to myself, as I hurried to open the door.

When I opened the door I saw Ramya standing outside. She was crying hysterically. “Prakash thank God you are here” she sobbed. “There’s no one else in the colony!”

“What happened?” I asked her, alarmed.

She told me that her son, Shanker, had been struck down by a car. “The ayah doesn’t know where they took him” she screamed. “Please help me!”

I hurriedly put on my shoes and led to her to my motorbike. “Where shall we search for him?” she moaned. “Let’s start with St. John’s Hospital” I said. It never occurred to me that they would have taken the boy to the Sanjay Gandhi Hospital.

We were at St. Johns in a few minutes. There is no such admission of a child hit by a vehicle, we were told. They suggested that we check at Sanjay Gandhi Hospital.

We rushed to Sanjay Gandhi Hospital.

By now I had overcome my initial shock and had started thinking coherently. The boy may be dead, I remember thinking. There’s no point in having Ramya with me when I go into the emergency wards in search of him, I concluded.

When we reached Sanjay Gandhi Hospital, I asked her rather firmly to wait outside when I went in search of the child.

Like all government hospitals, it was chaotic within. I asked a passing nurse where the emergency section was and she pointed it out to me. I ran over to the emergency ward but there was no one outside to help me. I decided to enter even though there was a board indicating that only authorized personnel must enter. When I entered I got the shock of my life. There, on a gurney, lay the boy. He looked very small and frail. His body was jerking spasmodically. There was blood all around him.

He seemed to be all alone. Though the room was full and doctors and nurses were moving all around on their various errands and tasks, no one was attending to him.

When I moved closer I could see that his eyes were rolling in their sockets. He appeared to be in a coma and was bleeding from the mouth as well as from a head wound; it was only with the greatest difficulty that he was able to breathe. He was making a very strong effort to inhale and was gasping for breath. The sound was inhuman. It was as if his throat was being choked by an unseen hand and he was struggling to take in the life sustaining oxygen.

I caught a passing doctor and screamed at him to help the child. He took one look at the child, told me “that child is dying. There is nothing we can do” and walked on, unconcerned.

I remembered that head injuries were best treated at NIMHANS. It so happened that I knew a senior scientist at NIMHANS. I asked the hospital to call him. They did.

At the best of times, NIHMANS staffs are difficult to get. Remember that in those days there were no cell phones. We had to depend on inefficient land lines and the probability of getting the person at the other end at a place like NIMHANS was very remote.

I just couldn’t believe it when I heard a voice at the other end saying “Dr. Saranath here. “Dr. Saranath!” I babbled “I need your help!”

“Calm down!” he said. “Who is this”?

I suddenly realized that I must get a grip on myself. I introduced myself and told him in a few quick sentences what had happened. “Dr. Ranganath of Sanjay Gandhi is well known to me. Tell him I asked him to help you” he said. “I will stay by the phone for the next half an hour” he added.

Amazingly, Dr. Ranganath was on duty at that time. The moment I let him know about Dr. Saranath’s request he swung into action. He rushed to the child’s side and started examining him.

“The child is unconscious” he told me. “There is extensive head injury. He is hovering between life and death.”

By now the Shanker’s condition had worsened. He had started going into fits. He had bitten his tongue and was bleeding profusely from the mouth. Two nurses rushed to clean up the wound and to insert a device into the mouth to prevent such injury from recurring. His eyes were still rolling wildly around.

“We need to do an immediate CAT scan” Dr. Ranganath said to me. “Our machine has broken down. Contact Medinova and ask them if their machine is free”. I was incredulous. “Can’t you do it, doctor?” I asked his. “No, I can’t” he said “there is some protocol involved. I will have to ask a government hospital to do it and I would rather it is done at Medinova”.

I called Dr. Saranath at NIMHANS to appraise him of the situation. “I know a doctor at Medinova he told me. “Let me check with him. I will call you back in ten minutes”. In less than five minutes he called back. “This is amazing” he said, “The doctor that I want to reach is Dr. Malik and they tell me that he is in Sanjay Gandhi Hospital at this very moment! Page him and ask him to call me”.

We soon located Dr. Malik. He called up Dr. Saranath who appraised him of the situation. Dr. Malik immediately called Medinova and instructed them to make the CAT scan free available as soon as the child reached there.

Normally, in those days, an accident case referred to a government hospital could not be referred to a private clinic. The only way was to transfer the child to another institution (in this case NIMHANS). This is a procedure that the duty doctors generally refuse to do in cases such as that of Shanker because in the event of a death and a police enquiry they could probably be accused of malpractice or negligence. In this case they knew Dr. Saranath well and handing over the child to NIMHANS' care made perfect sense. In a matter of minutes the paper work was done. The ambulance was ready to take the child to NIMHANS. Dr. Malik had stated that he would ride with the child in the ambulance to speed up things there on arrival. We were soon rushing out to the ambulance.

In all this melee I had completely forgotten about Ramya! I ran over to her and told her as quickly as I could that Shanker had been located and that he was being rushed to Medinova for a scan. I asked her to come there.

It’s the only time that I have been in an ambulance. It was an emergency and the ambulance driver drove as if the devil possessed him, the vehicle’s banshee wail clearing traffic ahead of us. We soon reached Medinova.

There was a medical crew waiting outside and they rushed the child to the scan area. While in the elevator, a nurse inserted a pipe into the mouth (and throat). It was apparently a suction device and I watched in horror at the large amounts of blood that it was suctioning out. Apparently he continued to bleed from the mouth and throat.

The child was still thrashing unconsciously and it took all of six people to hold him down (a CAT scan needs to be done in perfect stillness. Any slight movement renders the scan unintelligible). It took several scans before they were able to get any meaningful results. The scan showed signs of severe brain injury and damage. The scan revealed that the child wouldn't be able to breath unaided and needed to be put on a ventilator immediately if it was to survive.

Dr. Malik called Dr. Saranath with the results. “We have a ventilator standing by for the child” Dr. Saranath told him. Let’s bring the child back to NIMHANS.

Ramya had by now joined us at Medinova and I told her as quickly as I could what I knew. I told her the child would be transferred to NIMHANS and put on a ventilator as it was not able to breathe properly unassisted. At this bit of information she reeled back as if struck but quickly recovered and nodded. At least her beloved Shanker was alive!

The ambulance screamed its way back to NIHANS. The child was rushed to an operating theatre and a tracheotomy was done so that the ventilator tube could be inserted into the lung. A feeding tube was inserted separately into the stomach and the child was sedated and put on the ventilator. Thankfully his thrashing ceased and he seemed peaceful at last.

He stayed that way for over six months on a ventilator, his mother and a nurse his only companions. All they got from him was a flat blank stare. There appeared to be no life in those eyes.

One day, in his seventh month on the ventilator, he smiled! The nurse was so stunned that she screamed in delight. Soon he was frequently smiling. He slowly progressed to holding and squeezing people’s hands. But he couldn’t talk. The doctors felt that he would probably never talk or walk again as these were the areas of the brain that had received the most damage.

After about nine months of having being on a ventilator, the doctors decided to allow him to breathe on his own. He was taken off the ventilator. These were very tense moments for all present – the doctors nurses and his parents. After a few seconds of anguish (he had been used to mechanical ventilation) he started breathing on his own!

By now he could be also be hand fed.

One fine day the authorities told Ramya that she could take him home. He would be retarded all his life but he would live.

One day, many months after Shanker had gone home, my wife and I met Dr. Saranath. He asked us how Shanker was doing. “He is doing well” we told him. “You know, it is a miracle” Dr. Saranath said. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. The child was constantly on death’s doorstep. He could have died in Sanjay Gandhi hospital, but he didn’t. All the people that were necessary for him to survive were available almost immediately – myself, Dr. Ranganath, and Dr. Malik. He could have died in the ambulance – his chance of surviving the journey to Medinova were less than 10% and yet he made it! His chance of surviving the return trip to NIMHANS was equally slim and yet he made it. We normally never have a ventilator free and yet on that day, miraculously, there was one just waiting for him! This is no ordinary child! This is God’s child”.