Monday, June 6, 2011

ASV Rs. 400 per vial

Tuesday, June 7, 10:30 pm
"Madam ji... A child... Snake bite.... Jaldi ao...." And so i picked up my stethoscope and ran to find a 10 yr old girl still covered in the mud she was playing in and a crude tourniquet applied to her right leg where the local baba tried to stem the flow of the poison... No pulse... Pupils fixed and dilated... Extremities in rigor mortis... Time of death hours before her mother found her in the fields...  Before the villagers ran to arrange for a tempo to bring the girl to the nearest hospital.... Minutes after the deadly cobra stung her foot and left and she in all her innocent ignorance thought it to be an insect on the ground... And yet the father held her lifeless body and travelled 4 hours to bring her to madam ji.... Thats me btw... Who even if had seen her alive would have been helpless to save her owing to the non availabilty of anti snake venom in private hospitals, thanks to exorbitant costs and short shelf life...
Then begins the journey home... To return a daughter's body to the hands of a mother who has already accepted the fate of her child as the will of Naag ...

5 comments:

  1. Lydia, This was very moving. I started my ortho op list this morning, straightening, bent thumbs, toes. Your story put my work to shame.

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  2. ....but even if you had the ASV, how would you have known it was a Cobra?

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  3. The ASV we get in India is polyvalent, protecting mainly against the big 4 - indian cobra, common krait, russell's viper and the saw scaled viper. The cobra is the most common and the deadliest in this region, potent neurotoxin that kills in a matter of minutes. I knew it was the cobra owing to absence of hematoxic and local inflammatory signs, the quick death and the tribal belt they belonged to.

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  4. Can't it be stored in a fridge or freezer?

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  5. Even then expiry is few months....

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