Skip to main content

Medical Strangulation

Image
By
Gunja, a 31 years old pretty vivacious woman who works as a medical administrator in a corporate hospital and stays alone in an apartment, is perpetually frightened ever since she survived a near death experience from suffocation a year ago.

Over the last two years, every now and then she suddenly breaks out into angry itchy hives all over her body, along with a feeling of choking that makes her gasp for breath.

She recounts in horror when she had a particularly bad attack one early morning while she was alone at home. Soon after the skin hives started appearing, she experienced a feeling as though someone was tightening a noose around her throat. She gradually turned blue and lost consciousness.

Luckily, she had been able to pick up her cellphone and make a call to her doctor-friend who, sensing something seriously wrong had rushed to her home and injected her with adrenaline, which had saved her in the nick of time.

Subsequent tests showed that she suffered from a rare condition called angio-edema, in which an individual is prone to develop swelling (or edema) of the soft tissues and mucous membranes of the body on provocation by certain foods, medicines, bee stings, wasp bites or minor trauma. When the swelling occurs in the neck, especially around the wind-pipe, it obstructs the air passages, sometimes causing death from suffocation.

Angio-edema is rare, but many probably die due to lack of recognition and timely action. Gunja has been fortunate in that she works in a hospital, and her caring medical colleagues have been able to put

her through the requisite tests and prove that she indeed has a deficiency of a C1 q esterase enzyme that is the hallmark of this condition.

Medical suffocation, be it from angio-edema, or anaphylaxis a severe form of allergy, requires prompt recognition and action. Though intravenous injections of anti-allergics and corticosteroids often work, the specific therapy to turn things around is a subcutaneous injection of adrenaline.

A special pre-loaded adrenaline pen, or epipen as it is called, looks quite like an insulin pen, and is easy to self-use. It is helped save many lives. One just needs to jab it on one’s thigh and inject it.

That delay can cost lives was realised when a 14 year old Irish girl, Emma Sloan died of peanut allergy in a restaurant a few years ago. Seeing her daughter get breathless in a restaurant, her mother had rushed to the nearby chemist’s shop to procure an epipen. The Irish chemist refused to dispense the injection without a valid medical prescription. The young girl had collapsed and died minutes later.

Saving lives is sometimes all about timing and promptness. In the words of JFK, “The difference between salad and garbage is in the timing”.

My naughty mind often wonders what would be the fate of such patients if our courts were to decide on their treatment?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

By
One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...
1 comment
Read more

The Doctor’s Dress

By
The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...
2 comments
Read more

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

By
There is hardly any person in Uttar Pradesh who has not heard of Dr D K Chhabra, a senior neurosurgeon, who died recently. Over the decades his expertise, pragmatic advice and popularity had broken the shackles of his narrow surgical field coming to be known as a “brain-specialist”and a genuine adviser for all health problems. I got to know him in 1987 when I joined the upcoming Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow as a young member of the faculty in Gastroenterology. He had moved from his alma mater the KG Medical College where he is still regarded as a legend. An omnipresent bachelor doctor living in the duty room readily available to help anybody anytime.He was tasked to heading and developing Neurosciences at SGPGI. He had an eye for detail and was tasked additionally by the director to set up not just his department, but the whole hospital, the building, equipment and the campus. DKC was a tall and handsome man who spoke little. But when he did inl...
1 comment
Read more