AFMC asks doctor in wheelchair to clear hurdle

Harinder wants this condition to be waived since his father has spent close to Rs 5 lakhs on his treatment. But a letter he had sent to Defence Minister George Fernandes — he followed it with a reminder recently — has elicited no response.

“I am learning to cope,” he says as he tries to grapple with the physical and emotional pain and financial problems that have become his constant companion since October 22, 1998 when the Jonga the family was travelling in met with an accident and rolled down an incline on the Leh-Thoise stretch.

His father, Col S S Dhaliwal, then posted in the Siachen sector, and his mother were seriously injured. But it was Harinder who suffered the most — a damaged spinal cord left him paralysed waist downwards.

He recalls the nightmare: “During my holidays I was visiting my father. We were travelling in a Jonga when it met with an accident and toppled over. We all blacked out. I was the first to regain consciousness and found people pulling us out of the wreckage. I was in a state of shock and could not move my legs at all.”

“We were shifted to a nearby Army post and quickly evacuated by helicopter to the Military Hospital there. I was then taken to Chandimandir but there was no neuro surgeon there who could treat me. So I ended up at the Base Hospital in Delhi Cantt where I was operated upon. But by then four days had slipped past. In a spinal cord injury, the patient stands a good chance of recovery if he is operated upon within 24 hours.”

Harinder returned to AFMC six months later and completed his MBBS. But his career is stuck. While his colleagues have started their internship, he cannot — he has been given a provisional status as an intern — till he pays up.

Being a doctor himself, Harinder realises that recovery is a remote possibility for him now though his distraught parents hang onto the hope that their son would start walking again someday. “Normally in spinal cord injuries, one waits for a year-and-half for recovery. In my case that is over and there has been no real progress. I have tried everything — from allopathy to ayurveda to homeopathy — and even went to America after reading about a wonder drug called Nuralin. All to no avail.”

Today, Harinder’s mornings are spent wheeling himself around the Pune Cantonment Hospital and attending to patients for six hours at a stretch or helping in the operation theatre; he manages both tasks remarkably well. The afternoons are spent at home studying for GRE.

“I plan to go to the United States for research in the field of spinal cord injury. There is a lot happening there in this sphere like discovery of new medicines and a treatment called Functional Electrical Stimulus that is implanting of electrodes in the muscles which helps one to stand and walk. Basically, I want to set up a spinal cord institute in India which would provide advanced medical treatment in this field — from operation to rehabilitation to providing the right kind of wheelchairs.”

But that will come later. Harinder has to first pay up before he can dream anymore.