Pak national gets fresh lease of life in Delhi hospital
15 Sep 2012 12:35 AM GMT
It was a simple fever. Or so 36-year-old Abdul Samad thought in January 2011, while going to the doctor. A few tests, however, had doctors confused about what was ailing Samad. His haemoglobin was low and his blood platelet count was all wrong.
It was finally in May 2011 that Samad was diagnosed with Myelodysplastic Syndrome-MDS, a physical condition in which the body stops creating effective blood. It would be almost a year before he got a cure in a hospital in Delhi. BLK Super Speciality Hospital, Delhi, successfully did a bone marrow transplant on Samad, a Pakistani national in June, to give him a fresh lease of life. The surgery was rare because the donor was not related to Samad. Doctors at BLK feel that this will be the city’s first unrelated bone marrow transplant.
Samad, who works in the property business in Dubai, was asked to get a test done again in his home country to re-confirm the diagnosis. ‘Bone marrow transplants are not done in Dubai. So I went to my hometown Karachi. A test there reaffirmed that I was suffering from MDS,’ remembers Samad.
Doctors in Karachi told Samad that a bone marrow transplant was the only cure for his condition and he was told to look for a donor among his siblings.
It was a trying time for Samad and his family. His wife was his support and so he insists were his two daughters, though they are only 11 and 3.5 years old respectively. Samad wrote to hospitals in US and Europe, sometimes he would try to look for donors directly. But nothing was working out for him, till someone suggested that he tries out hospitals in India.
‘Samad came to us in March 2012. We contacted registries across the world and finally managed to find a donor whose samples matched Samad’s in Germany. Entire treatment took five to six weeks,’ said Dharma Choudhary, senior consultant [Hemato-Oncology] and director [Bone Marrow Transplant]. On Friday, three months after the transplant, Choudhary declared Samad totally recovered.
‘Five in one lakh Indians suffer from MDS. Elsewhere in the world, the problem is mostly seen among the elderly. But in Asian countries, even the young are getting affected,’ added Choudhary.
It was finally in May 2011 that Samad was diagnosed with Myelodysplastic Syndrome-MDS, a physical condition in which the body stops creating effective blood. It would be almost a year before he got a cure in a hospital in Delhi. BLK Super Speciality Hospital, Delhi, successfully did a bone marrow transplant on Samad, a Pakistani national in June, to give him a fresh lease of life. The surgery was rare because the donor was not related to Samad. Doctors at BLK feel that this will be the city’s first unrelated bone marrow transplant.
Samad, who works in the property business in Dubai, was asked to get a test done again in his home country to re-confirm the diagnosis. ‘Bone marrow transplants are not done in Dubai. So I went to my hometown Karachi. A test there reaffirmed that I was suffering from MDS,’ remembers Samad.
Doctors in Karachi told Samad that a bone marrow transplant was the only cure for his condition and he was told to look for a donor among his siblings.
It was a trying time for Samad and his family. His wife was his support and so he insists were his two daughters, though they are only 11 and 3.5 years old respectively. Samad wrote to hospitals in US and Europe, sometimes he would try to look for donors directly. But nothing was working out for him, till someone suggested that he tries out hospitals in India.
‘Samad came to us in March 2012. We contacted registries across the world and finally managed to find a donor whose samples matched Samad’s in Germany. Entire treatment took five to six weeks,’ said Dharma Choudhary, senior consultant [Hemato-Oncology] and director [Bone Marrow Transplant]. On Friday, three months after the transplant, Choudhary declared Samad totally recovered.
‘Five in one lakh Indians suffer from MDS. Elsewhere in the world, the problem is mostly seen among the elderly. But in Asian countries, even the young are getting affected,’ added Choudhary.
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