Almost 100 burn victims who have just returned home after undergoing primary treatment at the hospital are going to enter a new stage of their life – a struggle between further treatment and rehabilitation in family and society.
They will have to go through years of physiotherapy and psychiatric counseling to get back to normal life. Also faced with uncertainties in livelihoods, these people will have to come to the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) once a month for checkup, doctors say.
Over the past two months of non-stop blockade programme, as many as 165 people with burn injuries were admitted to the burn unit. Thirteen of them died there.
The burn unit released 96 people and has still been grappling with the rest of the patients. Of late, five more burn victims have been admitted.
“The burn victims whose conditions have been stable will now go through rounds of surgeries beginning this week. Some of them might need five reconstructive surgeries,” Abul Kalam, head of the Burn and Plastic Surgery department of DMCH, told Prothom Alo.
Dr Samanta Lal Sen, honourary adviser to the National Institute of Burn and Plastic Surgery at the DMCH, said the victims will lose mobility of their body parts unless surgeries are carried out as soon as required.
In fact, for the 96 victims, who have been released, a long road to recovery has just begun, say the doctors and their family members.
Siddiqur Rahman is one of them. Released from the burn unit on 23 February, Siddiqur and his family are trying to weather the storm that devastated their lives when a patrol bomb attack burned him and the “easy bike” he drove for earning a living, at the beginning of January.
Siddiqur still has not regained the mobility of his hands. His family is surviving on Tk 1 million family savings certificate they received from the prime minister.
With three school going children and a husband who needs expensive medicare facilities, Siddiqur’s wife Sharifa Akhter is suffering from a sense of uncertainty about their future.
Relatives of several other burn victims said they have received financial assistance from some philanthropists and charitable organisations.
However, most of the victims are so poor that they have to spend all of that money while they are still in the hospital. They can hardly save anything for their treatment afterwards.
Babu Sinha, a farmer from Moulvibazar is staying at the burn unit for over a month for the treatment of his son Niranjan, 19. Apart from the Tk 1 million family savings certificate from the premier, he received additional Tk 100,000 from a donor. Already an amount of Tk 30,000 of donation money has been spent on Niranjan. This father does not know when his son will be well enough to be released from hospital.
According to doctors, human skin has seven protective layers. In case of injuries from petrol bomb victims, the fire burns through all seven layers. Some victims’ injuries were so severe that the fire burned their flesh and bones as well.
Source: Prothom Alo
