Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Delaying Rajdhani by 10 minutes saves 3-month-old

BOKARO: Railway officials at Bokaro station stopped the New Delhi-bound Rajdhani Express for 10 extra minutes on Monday night to save the life of a three-month-old baby suffering from a congenital lung ailment.

The baby, Kabya Lenka, suffers from Type 2 congenital pulmonary cystic adenomatoid malformation and needed oxygen. Kabya's parents boarded the train from Cuttack on Monday morning and were going to New Delhi for her treatment at All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Father Hurshikesh Lenka, an engineer at a private company in Hyderabad, said Kabya's condition started deteriorating an hour before the train reached Jamshedpur. "A doctor, who was travelling with the family, said the infant needed oxygen immediately," said Dr Ranjit Kumar, senior divisional medical officer at Bokaro Railway Hospital.

The coach attendant and the ticket examiner were informed about the infant and a message was sent to railway authorities in Jamshedpur and Bokaro, a three-hour journey. However, the parents' ordeal continued for three hours before a solution was found.

Sources in the railways said officials at Bokaro station asked Kumar to provide an oxygen cylinder, but he refused. Asked why he did not help the couple, Kumar said, "We had only one cylinder and if I had given that one out, how would the other patients be treated. I had gone to the station and checked the baby and administered medicine."

But the railway staff was fast to act and contacted privately-run Shivam Hospital in Bokaro township, which is 9km from the station, and asked for help.

"The Rajdhani arrived at Bokaro station at 6.55pm on Monday, which is 10 minutes before scheduled time. Till then oxygen had not arrived as the ambulance carrying it was on the way. We waited and the ambulance arrived at the station only when the train was to leave at 7.15pm. So we delayed the train for 10 minutes until the oxygen cylinder was installed. Their coach was also shifted from AC-3 tier to 2-tier for convenience," said a railway official on Tuesday.

However, the train got delayed by more than eight hours after crossing Gomoh as a Patna-Hatia passenger train got derailed near Gajhandi. "The train is running late, but now our baby is better and we are hoping that we will reach AIIMS safely," Lenka told TOI on the phone.

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