Back to square one

Over the last 2 weeks, we were on the move once again and are now based at a small mofussil town in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, about 300 kilometers from Palamu region. We’re not quite sure about the future, but for now, we would be based at Kachhwa Christian Hospital, Kacchwa, Mirzapur District.

We are about 50 kilometers from Varanasi or Banaras. In fact, the river Ganges is just 2 kilometers from where we are now.

Coming to the hospital, it serves the small town of Kachhwa. I shall write about the place in a later post. The best part of my first week was a 30 year of mother of two who was brought in gasping after she got bitten by an unknown snake. She was almost dead.

Our team got her intubated and resuscitated in no time. Considering that she did not have swelling over her bite site, we were quite sure that it was a krait bite. We had ASV pumping into her veins in no time. And what did we have for the mechanical ventilation?

I could not believe my eyes when I saw the machine. It was the same one; the war horse we had at NJH when we reached there in 2010.

The Newmon ventilator did a wonderful job for about 24 hours before she ran out of steam.  The relatives did manual ventilation for about 8 hours before the machine started to work again.

Thankfully, the lady could be weaned from the ventilator by 48 hours. Unfortunately, we discovered that she had some amount of brain damage, which may have occurred during the period of cardiac arrest (We do not know on how long she had not been breathing. The relatives told that she stopped to breathe about 5 minutes before we intervened.).

Our patients would definitely benefit if we had one more Newmon ventilator. It costs about 80,000 INR now (1350 USD, 820 GBPs, 1050 Euros) and the people here know where the machine can be purchased.

More on the clinical exploits at Kachhwa and about the place in a later post . . .