FASTING IROM SHARMILA WAS ADMINISTERED A RICH AND BALANCED DIET, THRICE A DAY
IMPHAL: Irom Sharmila, who ended the world’s longest hunger strike on Tuesday afternoon with a lick of honey, was force-fed a rich diet through a nasal pipe every day of her 16-year fast.
The Manipur government spent at least `10,000 a month on a special vitamin and mineral-enriched diet to ensure the right activist did not – at least technically -- go hungry.
“She is getting the healthiest and most balanced of diets that even the richest Indian is probably not getting,” one of the doctors who attended to her in Imphal’s Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences (JNIMS) said on Tuesday.
Till Tuesday afternoon, it took at least 40 persons — five JNIMS doctors, 12 nurses, three policewomen in civilian clothes and two medical supervisors from Imphal jail besides a ring of policemen — to ensure that Sharmila received her injections of nutrients through the feeding tube.
Thrice a day, she was given supplements with adequate amounts of calcium, fats, carbohydrate and vitamins.
“We tweaked the nutrient dosage if she lost or gained weight (maintained at 51 kg),” a former head of medicine at JNIMS said.
“She usually cooperated but was tough to handle during one of her mood swings.”
On those days, she would pull out the nasal tube and had to be put on intravenous glucose drip. Doctors and prison officials would then talk her into accepting the tube again.
Apart from the “doctored diet”, Sharmila did four hours of yoga and walked—escorted—in the corridor outside her ward.
Arrested periodically for attempt to suicide, Sharmila had been in custody of the Imphal central jail in but spent most of her 5,757 hunger strike days in the hospital.