Rims plans surgery of black fungus patient after HC rap

Ranchi: Hours after the Jharkhand high court pulled up the Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (Rims), Ranchi for negligence of a 45-year-old black fungus patient named Usha Devi, who has been admitted at the state-run hospital since May 17, the hospital swung into action and has now planned her surgery for Thursday.
Last week, Usha’s son Gaurav Gupta had written to chief minister Hemant Soren where he, besides requesting the CM for monetary help, had brought to his attention to the ‘lackadaisical attitude of the doctors at Rims’ which led to the worsening condition of his mother. He had claimed that his mother has been admitted at the hospital for more than one and a half months and the doctors’ negligence made her condition critical.
Like Usha, many mucormycosis (black fungus) patients at Rims – which has been designated as a centre of excellence for treating mucormycosis patients after the state government notified the fungal infection as an epidemic -- are faced with a similar ordeal. On Wednesday, TOI visited the dengue ward, which has been converted into a dedicated ward for mucormycosis patients, and found that many are in need of a surgery and the doctors haven’t even informed them when exactly that will take place. Some of the patients’ relatives claimed that compulsory surgeries are being postponed or cancelled due to the lack of co-ordination among the doctors.
TOI spoke to an ENT specialist and surgeon named Dr Abhishek Kumar Ramadhin, who has been treating black fungus patients for some months, and he said that it is imperative to remove the fungal load of such patients and debridement surgery is the only to go about it. “There are different kinds of fungal infection and many can be treated with medicines only but black fungus requires surgery. I have treated 29 patients of mucormycosis and I have operated on all of them because medicines alone cannot cure such patients,” he said.
As per the hospital’s records, 51 mucormycosis patients have been treated at Rims till date, of which, three patients underwent surgery. At present, 21 patients are currently admitted at Rims. The rest were either discharged or died from the infection.
According to some sources at the hospital, over a dozen patients were declared fit for surgery by the doctors of the anaesthesia department last month but the surgeons from ENT department did not operate on them. “In the past one and a half months, my colleagues and I have declared 14 mucormycosis patients fit for surgery after conducting a pre anaesthesia check-up but only three have undergone surgery till date. I do not know the reasons behind it but the nodal officer should take a note of it,” a doctor in the anaesthesia department said.
TOI tried contacting the nodal officer for mucormycosis at Rims, Dr C K Birua, to enquire about the reasons behind the low number of surgeries but she didn’t respond to calls.
Some patients even said that they are forced to purchase medicines from outside. “My wife was admitted here for around a week and the doctors discharged her after assuring us that she has recovered. However, her health deteriorated once we took her home and she had to be re-admitted. I have already spent over Rs 50,000 in purchasing Posconazole,” one Prabhu Ram said.