COVID was a nightmare difficult to relive. However, it has tales of horror but tales of surmounting all odds.
New Delhi (India), July 12: The story of Shreya Brahma a 9-year-old girl at that time is one such instance. It was the first wave of COVID when Shreya’s parents noticed the large bruises on her body and she complained of tiredness, aches and pains. However, visiting a doctor at that time was not an option most parents were likely to take. Then came the fever, unrelenting and continuous, which the little girl bore with fortitude. With trepidation, the parents visited a local doctor who diagnosed COVID.
Most Pediatric Units struggled with a lack of beds and staff. Shreya Brahma’s parents finally found a bed for her in the COVID ward at Peerless Hospital.
The Pediatric team of Peerless Hospital, led by Dr. Sanjukta De, and the Hematology team, led by Dr. Shazi Gulshan, soon understood that all of Shreya’s symptoms were not due to COVID. The preliminary test confirmed their worst fears that this was acute leukaemia. This double misfortune hit Shreya’s parents hard. They were almost prepared to give up, but Shreya was a fighter and so were her doctors at Peerless Hospital.
‘The hardest part of treating her at the time was the lack of proper human contact. To relate to a child who is fighting both her illness and fear of being surrounded by strangers wearing PPE whose faces she could not see was a huge challenge. She remained COVID-positive for weeks on end as her immune system coped with the onslaught’, said Dr Sanjukta De, her paediatrician.
There were no guidelines at all in place to treat Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) in the setting of COVID being positive. ‘It was a slow cautious step balancing her Chemotherapy regime with the COVID treatment and to titrate the dose of her steroids, which are needed in both’, says Dr. Shazia Gulshan her Haemato-oncologist.
The other logistic was to find enough blood products and platelets for her when her counts dropped. It was COVID times and blood banks were running dry. To give their parents the best outcome possible despite odds, the doctors of Peerless Hospital including Dr. Sanjukta De donated blood to keep the blood bank running. It was humanity at its best.
The following two years of ALL remission & maintenance therapy saw Shreya getting admitted multiple times. Inspite of all odds, she would channel her energy into her drawings and kept on creating her masterpieces. The pain kept her from her favourite past time, dancing, but her imagination found new wings.
She was immensely brave in the worst of times, but broke down when her beautiful mane of hair started falling out in locks.
Two years later, she is in remission—that is, cured. Her hair has grown back. She has gone back to dancing, though she still remains a prolific painter.
The walls of Dr. Sanjukta De’s and Dr. Shazia Gulshan’s chamber been silent testimony to the struggle of this child who through her artwork gave the doctor’s the strength to fight for her.
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Divya Agarwal
