Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
UP man travels 1,500km to get oxygen bed and remdesivir in Mumbai
MUMBAI: A 47-year-old man travelled 1,500km in an ambulance from Ayodhya to a hospital in Dharavi to for oxygen support and treatment for Covid-19 at a time when Uttar Pradesh was in the midst of an oxygen crisis leading many hospitals in Lucknow and other cities in the state to turn patients away. By the time Shamshad Khan reached Mumbai on the night of April 26, he had entered into an acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and his oxygen saturation had dropped to 50%.
“I had lost all hope,” said Khan, who owns a bakery machine business. “When we set out for Mumbai in the ambulance, I was not sure if I would make it alive,” he said.
Khan was discharged after an 18-day long hospital stay. He is now strapped to an oxygen concentrator at a relative’s home in Powai, in order to enable him to breathe better.
Khan was on a business trip to Burdwan in West Bengal where he first felt severe weakness. He consulted a local physician there, by which his oxygen saturation had started dropping.
The doctors advised him for immediate admission, but Khan decided to return to Ayodhya to get hospitalised. But as his breathing became difficult, he was rushed to a hospital in Gonda, 50 km away from Ayodhya.
“The hospital did not have vacant ICU beds. They were also struggling with oxygen, and we were asked to arrange for our own cylinder,” said Khan’s son Sarfaraz, who spread out messages within his business community, and managed to get two cylinders.
Khan’s CT scan showed bilateral pneumonia with widespread infection in both the lungs. His CT severity score was 19/25 -- which indicated a severe infection.
For want of an ICU bed, the family decided to shift him to the government-run Rajashri Dashrath Medical College in Ayodhya, which has a 300-bed hospital attached to it. But this hospital too was reeling under a severe oxygen crisis. “We were first asked if we had our own oxygen cylinder. Since we had arranged for two cylinders, my father was taken in,” said Sarfaraz, who was allowed to be at his bedside even as relatives should not be allowed in Covid-19 wards due to the risk of infection. The doctors asked Khan to be immediately put on the antiviral drug remdesivir, but the hospital had no stock. “They asked us to get the drug, but we couldn’t source it from anywhere. In the meanwhile, I could see my father’s condition worsening every passing moment,” he said adding that arranging for more oxygen cylinders was also getting difficult.
That’s when the family decided to take the risk and shift Khan to Mumbai. They began the journey in the cardiac ambulance on April 25 at 3 pm. Khan’s elder brother Rizwan, who resides in Mumbai, coordinated with his contacts to arrange for a bed in Mumbai.
“We covered the distance in nearly 28 hours, stopping only to fill diesel and very quick meal breaks,” said Sarfaraz, who followed the ambulance in his car. “At one point, I became so anxious that I had to abruptly stop the ambulance to check on my father even as the ambulance had a ward boy and a paramedic inside,” he said.
The next day on April 26, the ambulance reached the Sai Hospital in Dharavi, where the Khans had managed to secure a bed.
“The patient was severely desaturated. We had to put him on a non-invasive ventilator with 50 litres of oxygen per minute,” said Dr Dyaneshwar Waghmare, a physician at the Dharavi centre adding that his
CT severity score had further worsened to 22/25 by this time. “He was also given remdesivir along with other medication,” he said. While Khan did not have other comorbidities, he weighed 123 kg, which was a concerning factor.
In the last week of April, Mumbai was still recording a high number of cases. On the day Khan was admitted to the Dharavi facility, the city had recorded 3840 cases. Beds were still in short supply. “It was a difficult situation, but we managed a bed somehow,” said Dr. Khalid Shaikh, the director of the Dharavi facility. The family spent Rs 75,000 for the cardiac ambulance and nearly Rs 3 lakh for the hospitalisation.
As the number of Covid-19 cases rose in Uttar Pradesh, a severe oxygen crisis hit many states.
The recent incidents of bodies floating in the Ganga River have further put focus on the state and caused panic among the locals.
“Our patient load was very high in the last two weeks of April,” said Dr Vijay Kumar, the dean of Rajashri Dashrath Medical College in Ayodhya where Khan was admitted. “The remdesivir injection was not available for some time, but it is now being supplied regularly,” he said.
Kumar said that the hospital has 142 oxygen beds--30 beds have pipeline connections to four small oxygen generation plants while the rest of the beds are managed with cylinders.
“A large oxygen generation plant is being constructed and is likely to be ready soon,” he said.