HYDERABAD: Twenty-six-year-old G Shulamithi is among the 34 women who underwent the Double Puncture Laparoscopy (DPL) in the family planning camp organised by the State government on August 25. After getting married at an early age, she bore four children, including three girls and a boy, and finally decided to have a sterilisation operation when an ASHA worker insisted. The said routine procedure soon turned into a nightmare as four women who underwent the surgery along with her died after developing complications.
The remaining 30 women are now admitted to various hospitals as part of precautionary measures. According to doctors and medical officers deployed by the State government, the condition of these women is stable. However, some of them are still complaining of abdominal pain.
Shulamithi said that one of the women who died was lying next to her in the post-operative room. “The surgeon came 30 minutes after I got anaesthesia from a nurse. I was second in the queue. A nurse took me inside. The doctor performed the surgery and within three minutes I was moved to a different room. It felt like my organs were being pulled outside,” she added. “No one attended to me until the nurse came and asked me to go home,” she said.
“Laparoscopic surgeries in such camps are done within five minutes as they use local anaesthesia,” said a senior gynaecologist working in a government hospital. “It takes at least half an hour for the same surgery in a public or private hospital as general anaesthesia is used there,” she added. According to her, how many cases the doctor performed that day or the previous day should not be an issue as doctors even conduct 400-500 such surgeries in a single day. Even though there is no mention of age in the guidelines provided by the Central government, the gynaecologist believes that DPL is safe to perform on women above 22 years.
The surgery is taught to all the senior residents in the State. However, only a few who are highly experienced are asked by the State to operate on women in the medical camps. Currently, there are four such doctors. Only one of them, who was on a contract basis, performed the surgeries at Ibrahimpatnam.
“Two-three days after the surgery, we got a call from the hospital. They told us to get admitted as we might have some infection,” said 22-year-old S Mamatha. All the women were initially admitted to the Community Health Centre in Ibrahimpatnam. As precautionary measures they are now put on high antibiotics.“We just treated the pus they developed on the wound,” a physician attending to these patients at the NIMS said.
REGISTRATION TEMPORARILY CANCELLED
Telangana State Medical Council chairman Dr V Rajalingam said, “The doctor is highly experienced and qualified. He is a retired MS general surgeon and has performed thousands of surgeries during the course of his entire government service. The TSMC has temporarily cancelled his registration and it will be revoked if he is found guilty.”
BSP blames KCR, Harish Rao
Adilabad: BSP leaders and activists staged a protest in front of the RIMS government hospital on Thursday, demanding the resignation of Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and Health Minister T Harish Rao owing responsibility for the botched family planning operations that claimed the lives of four women. BSP district president Gadugu Mahender said that the Chief Minister and Health Minister should resign taking responsibility for the incident, and provide financial assistance of `50 lakh to the affected families, as well as government jobs and houses.