By Dr Vijay Mahajan
I t was the winter of 1074.I was posted as registrar in the Department of Emergency, PGI, Chandigarh.With a hailstorm blowing outside, at about mid night, an elderly woman from Amritsar entered an emergency ward with her grown-up son on the stretcher.
The young man was in a coma.On being asked his history, the frail woman told me he had been bitten by a pet dog a few dais ago.She said he grew extremely restless two days ago, before lapsing into the coma.
Making a probable diagnosis of "rabbis", I advised her to take the patient to the sector nine, as per policy, rabies cases were not admitted in the institute.
On hearing this, she began to cry and pleaded that he be admitted.She said her husband was no more, she was alone and the weather outside was extremely bad.The patient was her only child.
My house surgeon even went ahead to say, "Mata ji, rabies cases has no cure.It's better that you take your son back to Amritsar."
But with folded hands, the teary-eyed woman kept pleading.Moved, I admitted her son in the emergency, certain about a serious rebuke from my seniors in the morning.As anticipated, the consultant in the morning was red faced and rebuked me for working against hospital policy.
Finally, a settlement was reached between me and consultant, wherein the patient would be shifted to a newly constructed ward and I would be solely responsible for his care.I took up the challenge.
The patient was shifted to a room in this newly constructed area which was not functional yet and getting round the clock nursing care there was a big problem.However, I got in touch with the ward in charge in the neighboring ward who agreed tp provide nursing care on humanitarian ground.I would visit the patient about 4-4 times a day, getting nurses from the adjoining ward to provide him care, feed, medicines etc.
The news of a patient suffering from rabies in the hospital like wild fire.The interest was that had this patient survived, this would become as the first case in this world since no case of survival from rabies had been reported in world medical literature until then.
A month passed and there was no change in the patient's condition.On a day during the fifth week since his admission, while examining the patient, I found his penis had turned blue due to a tape wrapped around it for condom drainage of urine.I immediately contacted a registrar in the department of Urology, who examined him and advised an amputation ( removal of an organ).
Being very busy, the urologist could schedule the amputation surgery to be performed at the paten's bed side-only at 11 pm that night.I arranged a surgical set and the urologist reached at the appointed time.However, after starting the proceedings, when the surgeon asked for the scalpel, to my surprise it was missing from the set furious, the surgeon threw aside the surgical implements and left the scene.
Repeated requests to the surgeon tp come again, failed.
The missing scalpel, however , turned to be a blessing in disguise.The condition of the affected organ gradually improved and became absolutely normal within a week.
The upcoming event was astonishing.A week later, a nurse scampered out of the patient's room , shouting "Bhoot, Bhoot" (Ghost).I made her stop outside the door but she ran away.On entering the room, to my great surprise, I found the patient sitting and talking to his mother.This was unbelievable.The news of the patient's sudden consciousness spread all over PGI as it was the first patient of rabies in the world that had survived.It would have been written down as rarest of rare cases in some reputed journals across the world.
However, it was decided to take a biopsy from the brain for confirming the diagnosis before publishing the case in the reputed journals.A biopsy revealed startling diagnosis.I turned out to be a case of "Larva Migrants"-rather than "Rabies" -which is again an extremely rare disease caused by ingesting the faces of infected dog, but the disease caused by ingesting the faces of infected dog, but the disease is less fatal then rabies.Here was a patient who barely escaped an amputation of the penis and became perfectly normal in health after a six-week coma.
Some days later, during subsequent follow-up, it gave me boundless pleasure to see him with a lovely tall girl, who his mother said, was his fiancee.
The incident goes to prove that "Nothing can harm the one whom God choose to live"
The author Dr Vijay Mahajan is a Jalandhar-based Managing Director of Tagore Hospital & Heart Care Centre (P)Ltd.