Govt & Doctors Fight while Rape Victim Battles for Life at Singapore

Government and Doctors Body are in fight over Delhi Rape Victim’s transfer to Singapore,while she is struggling for survival at Mt. Elizabeth Hospital there. Doctors say it was a Government decision while Government denies any such role. It was a “purely medical decision” to shift the 23-year-old gang-rape victim to Singapore and it was not due to political reasons, External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said on Friday.

“It was done for medical purposes. It was purely a medical decision taken by the doctors,” Khurshid said to a question on reports that Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit was behind the move to shift the gang-rape victim to Singapore Wednesday night.

Khurshid stresssed the “shifting was not done due to any political reasons”.

He said the government had helped with arranging for passports and visa for flying out the young woman and her parents to Singapore.

Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde also said the decision to shift the gang-rape victim to a Singapore hospital was made after consulting specialists.

“She was shifted after taking the opinions of doctors from Safdarjung Hospital. Trauma doctors were also consulted along with Dr. Naresh Trehan. She is still critical today. We will give her the best of treatment. Be it Singapore, London or America, we will send her wherever possible so that she recovers soon,” Shinde told reporters after an all-party meet on the Telangana issue.

Doctors in the national capital said moving her abroad in such a condition was “unusual”. There was “no logic” behind it.

“I can’t understand the logic behind it, or rather it is unusual to transfer the girl from Delhi to Singapore when the patient has suffered a cardiac arrest, as I have been informed by the media,” Samiran Nundy, chairman, department of surgical gastroenterology and organ transplantation, Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, told IANS.

The 23-year-old victim was brutally beaten and raped by six men on a moving bus in Delhi Dec 16. She now fights for life with severe multiple intestinal, abdominal and other injuries. She was flown to Singapore’s Mount Elizabeth Hospital late Wednesday night.

“My suggestion would have been to stabilise her in India and get her out of the crisis; then do her intestinal transplant later. One cannot think about intestinal transplant at this moment. First, the infection spreading in her should be stopped, then one can think about transplant,” Nundy said.

Another senior doctor from the trauma centre of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, requesting anonymity, said: “Maybe it was politically logical to shift the patient. But as a doctor, I would say it is totally insensitive to shift the patient with her infection spreading. Shifting now, that too within a few hours of cardiac arrest, is thoughtless.”

Mount Elizabeth Hospital, where the woman is being treated has confirmed that she had a cardiac arrest in the early hours of Wednesday.

Nundy also said that in case of intestinal transplant, chances of survival are five years in 60 percent of cases, and one year in 80 percent.

Meanwhile, doctors treating the woman at the Mount Elizabeth Hospital in Singapore have said she had suffered “significant brain injury” and continued to be in an “extremely critical condition”.

Besides a prior cardiac arrest, the woman also had infection in her lungs and abdomen, “as well as significant brain injury”, Kelvin Loh, the hospital’s chief executive officer, was quoted as saying by the Straits Times.

“The patient is currently struggling against odds, and fighting for her life,” he said.

He said a multi-disciplinary team of specialists has been working round-the-clock to treat her since her arrival Thursday. They were “doing everything possible to stabilise her condition over the next few days”, he added.

According to Doctors, the call came around 9 a.m. on Wednesday asking for arrangements to be made to fly the 23-year-old gang-rape victim abroad for treatment as well as her parents that very evening. In just 12 hours, after a flurry of calls, including many international ones, everything was finalized to fly the critically ill young woman to Singapore.

“We had to arrange for passports as they did not have any passport and visas. We had to make all the arrangements in between juggling the visit of the Nepal president (Ram Baran Yadav)… Quite a few calls were made to get everything done,” an informed source told IANS, requesting anonymity.

There was talk of sending the woman to either Germany or Britain too for treatment but the Singapore hospital, Mount Elizabeth, was settled upon, the source added. Singapore is also nearer, cutting down the flying time for the critically ill patient.

“After making arrangements with Singapore to send the patient and her parents, we also had to think about where the parents would stay… That was arranged by our mission there,” the source said.

The gang-rape victim was flown out to Singapore in an air ambulance late Wednesday night.

She is in “extremely critical condition” at Mount Elizabeth Hospital’s intensive care unit, a bulletin from the hospital said Friday.

In addition to a cardiac arrest she had suffered before being admitted, the young woman also had infection in her lungs and abdomen, “as well as significant brain injury”, according to Kelvin Loh, the hospital’s chief executive officer.

The woman, a physiotherapist, was gang-raped and tortured by six men on board a moving bus in south Delhi Dec 16 night. She suffered extensive injuries to her abdomen and had to have her small intestines removed. Sepsis also set in and her condition kept deteriorating.

The savage gang-rape has led to massive protests in New Delhi and calls for stricter punishment for rape.