Systems fail a young mother

Calcutta, Aug. 1: Calcuttans tried many a trick to fight the discomfiture induced by rolling power cuts today but a doctor in a pitch-dark labour room had little else other than a pack of cotton to help a lady who had become a mother minutes ago.

The young mother lay in the labour room bleeding for 30 minutes this morning as the doctor could not stitch the cut in the feeble light of candles and hand-held torches, while three generator sets squatted defunct in the government-run Chittaranjan Seva Sadan, a hospital less than 500 metres from the chief minister’s home.

“I had a very nervous time inside the operation theatre. We had done an episiotomy or incision of the vaginal wall to facilitate delivery. But just after the baby had been taken out, the power went off and the operation theatre became completely dark. I couldn’t put the stitches,” said a doctor who preferred to remain anonymous because of the sensitivities involved.

“I used a cotton pack to stop the bleeding. I had to change the pack a couple of times as the bleeding continued,” he added.

The mother and child are doing well.

Three CESC generating stations tripped one after the other after a small fire hit a state-run utility at Kalyani on Sunday night, igniting a cascading shortfall that tormented the city. (See Metro)

Many hospitals used generators, but at the state-run Chittaranjan Seva Sadan, none of the three generators worked.

The labour room was equipped with a torch and candles but their light proved insufficient for putting stitches. “We have to be doubly careful in such cases as there is every chance of haematoma (localised collection of blood outside the blood vessels),” the doctor said.

The 10KVA generator sets had been installed three years ago to ensure uninterrupted power supply to the labour room, labour observation room and operation theatres.

Engineers who checked the generator sets this evening said their batteries had conked out because of lack of maintenance.

Sources at the hospital said the generator room had hardly ever been opened in the past three years.

A fourth generator that was hired today was returned unused as it could not be connected to the hospital’s “old and complex” wiring.

“The PHE (public health engineering) department had handed over the three generators during the tenure of my predecessor. In the normal course, the ward master, who has all the Group D staff under him, should have been in charge of their maintenance but no one had probably been assigned the job. All this could have stemmed from a lack of funds,” said medical superintendent Asis Kumar Mukhopadhyay.

Later, Mukhopadhyay said: “We will make sure the generators work by tomorrow and are regularly maintained.”