Kargil won, armyman losing son’s battle

With nine Army medals to his credit and a service record that lists the Kargil War and Operation Parakram, Naik Subedar Rajesh Lal Verma can’t get himself to win the mundane battles of life. Or, so it seems.

Bedridden for the last 19 months, after a road accident inflicted severe head injuries, his 19-year-old son Amit Verma today survives on a liquid diet, cannot speak; and sometimes, as if to mark a rare departure from his crippled state, manages to hold his hands up and break into a smile.

In spite of desperate visits to half a dozen hospitals and intermittent hospitalisation, he has remained bedridden since October 6, 2006, when his motorcycle skidded off the road while returning from college in Secunderabad.

And all this because the four Army hospitals across the country that have treated him and the two in Delhi — the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and Sir Ganga Ram Hospital (SGRH) — that turned him away expressing helplessness, do not deal in stem cell therapy for his Diffuse Axonal injury, the result of a severe whiplash injury that renders a patient comatose or, as in Amit’s case, in a vegetative state. From the Military Hospital in Secunderabad to Command Hospital (Southern Command) in Pune, from where Verma was referred to the Army Hospital (Research and Referral) in Delhi between October 2006 and February 2007, none deal with stem cell therapy — the only ray of hope for the Vermas — that is widely considered potent enough for the development of therapies for untreatable diseases.

“We do offer stem cell treatment for neurological disorders like stroke, Parkinson’s Disease, heart ailments, cancer and spinal injury. Head injuries are quite vast in number and therapies for various complications are still in the research stage,” says Dr Y K Gupta, public relations officer at AIIMS.

Dr Ish Anand, neurosurgeon at SGRH, who saw Amit’s case, says stem cell therapy is “still in its primitive stages”. “Stem cell is not recommended. At SGRH, this treatment is still in its primitive stage. Till now, there have been no authentic reports on whether this therapy brings about any improvement in patients’ status. My experience says that stem cell cases show no improvement,” Anand says.

As in the West, doctors here too are debating the ethical aspect of the therapy. While scientists say stem cells may be used to replace or repair damaged cells and have the potential to drastically change the treatment of conditions like cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Disease and even paralysis, divisions over how to conduct that research run deep.

And, irrespective of the raging debate, Nu Tech Mediworld (NTM), a multi-speciality hospital in Green Park, has offered help to the Vermas. But at a price: Rs 8-10 lakh for three stages of cure.

“I’ve diagnosed Amit’s case and recommend stem cell therapy. But since the treatment is very new, there is no guarantee of full recovery. We’ll try the regeneration of his brain since it’s completely damaged,” says Dr Geeta Shroff, who examined Amit’s case at Nu Tech Mediworld.

But, in a letter dated March 16, 2008, the Army has turned down a request for funding Amit’s treatment at NTM, saying that “Nu Tech Mediworld is not an empanelled hospital and it may not be feasible for military hospitals to refer the case for treatment under the government expense/reimbursement basis”. The Ministry of Defence didn’t respond to an e-mail query sent by The Indian Express on the issue.

And, after taking a loan to meet treatment expenses of more than Rs 3 lakh in the past 19 months — in addition to the subsidised treatment at Army hospitals — Verma has made several requests for help before everyone within his reach: the Army, local politicians in his home town of Raebareilly in Uttar Pradesh and even scientists at Johns Hopkins University in the US.

And while he goes from door to door for help with unstinted hope, his younger son has discontinued his studies and his wife has sold all her jewellery.