Dr. Sanjay Gupta has improved the reputation of TV docs everywhere – he performed brain surgery on a young girl crushed by building in earthquake-devastated Nepal, saving her life.
Speaking to CNN by phone, Gupta, who serves as the station’s mediacal correspondent, was pragmatic and humble about the feat, but also disturbed by the conditions.
“I’ve seen a lot of situations around the world, and this is as bad as I’ve ever seen it. They need more resources, they need more personnel here right now, and they’re expecting many more patients as these rescue operations go on. They’re barely able to keep up right now. It’s part of the reason they asked me (to help); I think they’re asking anybody to try to pitch in.”
CNN identified Gupta’s patient as Selena Dohal, 8. However, the Independent named her as 15-year-old Sandhya Chalise, and the New York Daily News just said she was 8. Nonetheless, the circumstances line up about how the girl came to get brain surgery from the TV doc at the overwhelmed Bir Hospital in Katmandu.
“She went to get some water, and a house collapsed on her head,” her grandfather Ram Prasad Duhal told a doctor.
Selena was under the house for a few hours, another doctor said. She was crushed, her skull fractured. Her family lived over two hours away, and when they reached Katmandu, blood had collected at the top of her brain and surgery was needed immediately to remove the clots.
The Nepalese medical team asked Gupta to scrub in – though in a devastated earthquake zone, that means using sterile water and iodine, not hot water in a scrub sink. Using a saw, rather than electrical drill – and without any electricity at all – Sanjay performed the brain surgery she so desperately needed: A craniotomy.
She is one of the lucky ones and is expected to recover from her injuries thanks to Sanjay. But many more won’t survive.
The Nepalese capital is overwhelmed with the injured. More than 4,000 people have been killed and 8,000 hurt in the strongest quake the country has seen in 80 years – 7.8-magnitude. People are being rescued from the rubble of toppled buildings now, their broken bodies brought in for treatment – or sometimes, brain surgery.
Injuries range from pelvic and lower and upper limb fractures, to head injuries like Selena’s.
Across the street from Bir Hospital, where Sanjay got a chance to shake off his TV doc persona and be a life-saving neurosurgeon, the injured wait under tarps at the Nepal Army Pavilion to be treated.
[Photo Courtesy Larry Busacca/Getty Images]
Dr. Sanjay Gupta Conducts Brain Surgery In Nepal, With Primitive Tools And No Electricity is an article from: The Inquisitr News
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