Dr Saurabh Gupta
I was only 6. I used to see patients flocking to my parents' clinic in Modinagar, Uttar Pradesh. To me, my father, a paediatrician, and mother, a gynaecologist, cured people of pain, gave them healthy babies, and brought smile on their faces. I saw people distributing ladoos after every child birth. I too gorged on them as a child.
No wonder then, I decided to follow in my parents' footsteps. Medicine was the only profession I wanted to be in. But I wanted to become a surgeon. A surgeon with his scalpel would bring immediate relief to someone's suffering, I thought.
Little did I know the harsh reality of a surgeon's life. I encountered it pretty early. I was doing my MCh (Plastic Surgery) . One day we got the news that a patient who met with a train accident is being brought to the hospital. We were to perform an emergency surgery.
I and my two colleagues rushed towards the emergency operation theatre when we saw ambulance stopping at its gate. The ward boys rushed with a stretcher. The patient was a woman, in her 30s. She was screaming in pain, and was drenched in blood.
As we rushed her inside, two strangers hurried inside the operation theatre. They were carrying her two legs, which were still joined at the pelvis.
We were aghast to see that she was cut into two equal halves. We didn't know what to do. More unnerving was the fact that in that state she was fully conscious and pleading to save her life. All her major blood vessels were crushed.
We tried our best to save her, worked for fourteen hours continuously trying to join the two separated halves, but failed.
That was the first time I lost a patient and the impact on me was devastating. I just felt a chill running down my spine as I write about it after all these years.
He was too young to know the strange, ironical reason of his pain – the presence of his twin inside his body who was almost formed, but was never born
It has been six years. And I have seen some of the most strangest cases and performed surgeries -- once I stitched face of a woman attacked with an axe by a stalker, on another occasion re-implanted face of a child that was hemi transected in a high impact road accident.
The fact that I could not save some lives still trouble me at times. I still redo those failed surgeries in my mind, trying to find an alternative way I could have saved that particular patient.
As a surgeon, you always carry a baggage of loss all the time, at times it makes you nervous and at other times, it makes you conscious.
During these moments , it helps to recall some of the most challenging cases where I succeeded as a doctor and regained my confidence as a surgeon and doctor.
This case never fails to lift my spirits.
I was doing my masters in surgery in Bikaner. That day I was on an emergency duty when I was called to see a boy, named Golu, who was complaining of stomach ache. The boy was in extreme pain and was tossing over the bed. As I touched his abdomen, I felt a firm unusual swelling. The ultrasound suggested some bony structures inside his abdomen. In normal circumstances, there could not be any bone in that part of the body. I tried to ease his pain with painkillers and advised some more tests.
The CT Scan confirmed that it was a mass of bones inside his stomach. We began researching on the possibilities and came to know about fetus-in-fetu, a rare occurrence. If a mother conceives twins but one foetus envelops another in the womb, the later remains inside its body. Till then only 48 such cases were reported worldwide.
Generally, it is diagnosed early in life as the child suffers from frequent stomach ache. But in this case, the parents were from rural background without proper access to healthcare and so the diagnosis was delayed.
We needed to perform a surgery to remove the dead foetus from the boy's abdomen. It was risky: the tumour was big, almost the size of a football and abutted his major artery and vein. We arranged many units of blood by mobilising locals to donate for the boy.
As we opened the foetus, we saw two tiny legs, two arms, a small face with all facial features intact.
We confirmed the neural tissue by histological test.
.
The foetus was removed through surgery and the little boy was cured of the pain. He was too young to know the strange, ironical reason of his pain – the presence of his twin inside his body who was almost formed, but was never born.
But I felt strange while preparing his discharge papers.
Life indeed is strange, and being in medicine, we see the strangest side of it. I am no more a trainee surgeon. I have seen it all and have accepted my profession with all the challenges--emotional or psychological--it brings along.
I am still happy being a doctor , happy that I have been able to bring a smile on the faces of so many patients – including, of course, Golu.
The writer is a senior plastic surgeon at Jaypee Hopital, Noida