A man who was attacked with a one-and-a-half-foot-long iron trident that pierced his neck from right to left, was successfully operated upon by doctors of NRS Medical College and Hospital early on Monday morning.
Bhaskar Ram, 32, a resident of Kalyani in Nadia district, travelled around 60km to reach NRS Medical College and Hospital around 2.30am on Monday.
“The patient came to us around 2.30am. A seven-member team comprising doctors and anaesthetists was formed. All of them rushed to the hospital so that the operation could be started at the earliest,” said the head of the department of ENT at NRS, Sumanta Dutta.
The operation started around 3.30am.
The biggest challenge, Dutta said was to take out the trident without damaging the arteries and veins of the patient.
“The trident, we have been told, is the patient’s ancestral property and is at least 150 years old. It was rusted and had pierced the patient from the right of his neck and protruded from the left. The part of the body has many vital arteries and veins which needed to be secured. We did his tracheotomy to secure his windpipe,” Dutta said.
A tracheostomy is a medical procedure that involves creating an opening in the neck in order to place a tube into a person’s windpipe.
Ram, who works in a shopping mall in Kalyani was allegedly attacked by two persons he knew and an altercation had led to the attack.
Police in Kalyani have arrested two persons — Bikram Sarkar, 21, and Joy Banik, 22 — for the attack on Ram. Both Sarkar and Banik are third-year students of Haringhata College in Nadia.
An official in the NRS Medical College and Hospital said the patient was “conscious and talking” when he was brought to the hospital.
“We were apprehending a lot of blood loss. The trident was pulled out of his body millimetre by millimetre. But luckily there was very little blood loss and the operation went well,” said an official of the ENT department of the hospital.
As there were “no complications,” the patient did not need to be kept in the ICU. “The fear of infection is still there. He has been kept under observation,” Dutta said. Ram’s release would depend upon the progress of his recovery post-operation, he added.