Bengaluru: A fall from the third floor could prove to be fatal in majority of the cases. Even if one survives such a fall, it would certainly land him or her in a hospital in a critical condition. In what could be described only as a miracle, a 19-month-old child, Tanisha, survived a 25-foot fall from the balcony of her apartment, but all she needed was a relatively minor surgery to take care of the swelling in her head, which was the only part of her body that was affected.
“My heart sank when I got a call from my brother that my daughter had fallen from the balcony of our house and they were rushing her to the hospital," said the girl’s father Tanisha's father Mahendra.
The accident was such that the girl had no external injury, but the skull had split open inside. “It is a miracle that the baby survived the fall," said Dr Suman Pallegar, consultant neurosurgeon, People Tree Hospital, who along with Dr Ravi Sachidanand, consultant ENT, Head and Neck Surgeon, performed the surgery.
"Generally in such cases, we have to decompress the brain by taking out a portion the skull to allow the swelling to expand and we wait for the swelling to subside. Surprisingly in Anisha’s case, the skull split in such away that there was space for the swelling to expand and what surgery we needed to do was partially done by the fall. It had occurred naturally because of the fall," explained Dr Suman.
The doctors, however, performed a small surgery as there was a rupture above the bony socket where the fracture had happened. “Her right eye was literally popping up and she would have lost her vision and we endoscopically took out the clot within the orbit," explained Dr Suman. The 45-minute surgery got smile back on the faces of the child and her parents.
“I thought I had lost her and when I saw her at the hospital with the bruise, I panicked. But the God has such miraculous ways to teach us that He is around," said Mahendra.
He and his wife Manju Devi have now taken safety measures in their apartment to prevent any such incidents in the future. “There are no safety measures in high-rise apartments and that was the reason the child fell from the balcony. Such measures should be in place," Dr Suman advised.
