Just when I think I've seen and heard well almost everything...
Brajagopal Layek at home, holding the pacemaker.
Picture by Gour Sharma Barakar
An octogenarian in Burdwan wears his pacemaker next to his heart all right but not under his skin. He keeps the machine in a cloth bag that hangs from his neck, and wipes it clean once in a while.
The lean, bespectacled Brajagopal Layek was apparently so fed up with regular infections because of the instrument that he slit open his skin with a blade and prised it out. It’s been hanging over his chest for the past five months.
A pacemaker uses electrical impulses, delivered by electrodes in touch with cardiac muscles, to regulate the beating of the heart. The electrodes still travel from the pacemaker into Layek’s heart.
The 82-year-old resident of Barakar near Asansol said he was fine with this arrangement, but doctors were aghast.
The Asansol cardiologist whom Layek consulted said he was stunned by what he saw. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a doctor and took a snap of him on my phone. But what he has done is not acceptable,” said V.B. Gupta.
Cardiac surgeon Kunal Sarkar said Layek could contract an infection anytime. “He needs to change the pacemaker immediately and plant it properly far from the infectious area. It is his great luck that he has survived so long like this.”
Layek had spent Rs 1 lakh in 1995 to get the machine implanted at Christian Medical College, Vellore.
For the next 10 years, he was okay, but complications developed thereafter. “My pulse rate went down and I felt dizzy. Our family physician suspected that the battery life of the pacemaker had been exhausted and suggested I contact Vellore,” said Layek, a retired technician of the Damodar Valley Corporation.
Doctors at CMC replaced the old battery with a new one in May 2005.
The going was again fine for Layek, an amateur homoeopath, for the next one year. In November 2005, he visited Vellore for a routine check-up. In the summer of 2006, he developed rashes with itching and a burning sensation on the patch of skin under which the pacemaker had been implanted. “I used to scratch the rashes and the skin became rough above the pacemaker with a burning sensation,” he said.
Vellore doctors told him the machine might have got infected during the battery change. “They sterilised it and shifted it to my left chest. I returned and resumed normal life but only for two years,” Layek said. In October 2008, he again developed rashes, itching and a burning sensation.
“We became fed up with the repeated travelling to Vellore and decided to consult a cardiologist in nearby Asansol. The doctor suspected infection in the pacemaker and suggested an ointment,” said Layek’s elder son Ashish, 45.
But the problem persisted. The Asansol cardiologist then advised Layek to shift the pacemaker to his abdomen because the skin on the left chest was not accepting it. “We again contacted Vellore, which wrote to us to come for another operation. But my father refused to go,” said Ashish.
This February, Layek used a shaving blade he had sterilised to slice his chest and take out the pacemaker. He applied an antiseptic cream on the cut and put a plaster on it. The wound healed with time.
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3 comments:
That's absolutely amazing! :)
Morning Rita I don't even want to show it to my son... How are your guy doing??
Dagan needs another new pacemaker and I think he goes down to Minneapolis in September for that. They said his upper chamber has stretched out again, but they aren't sure when. Just wanted to give us a heads up that his heart could fail again. But he's feeling well, likes his new job, and they are doing okay. :):)
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