Chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s health condition deteriorated after she underwent a procedure to remove fluid from her left knee at SSKM Hospital in September, sources in the state-run hospital said on Thursday.
Mamata, who is also the state’s health minister, suffered an infection after she underwent “fluid aspiration”, a procedure to draw out fluid accumulated inside the body with the help of a needle and syringe, the sources said.
The chief minister had on Wednesday said that her infection had become “septic” because of wrong treatment.
In her last known visit to any hospital for treatment, the chief minister went to SSKM Hospital, the state’s premier government-run healthcare institution, after returning from Spain and the UAE in September.
“Owing to the wrong treatment, my infection became septic. The way a saline channel is made in the arm, I was in that situation for seven days. I could not get up,” she said.
Mamata said some journalists were wrong to say that she went to Nabanna after 55 days on Tuesday. Mamata said she had been working all the while from home. “You can at best say that I was under IV (intravenous drip) for 10-12 days,” Mamata said.
An SSKM official told Metro on Thursday: “Immediately after she had returned home following the fluid aspiration, the infection aggravated. The total leukocyte count went up much above the normal range of 4,000 to 11,000 per cubic mm.” She was given intravenous medicine to control the sepsis, he added.
The fluid, sources said, was extracted by doctors of the physical medicine and rehabilitation department of SSKM.
A senior orthopaedic surgeon attached to a private hospital said "one of the commonest complications" for fluid aspiration was an infection.
“In the case of hemarthrosis, a condition in which there is an accumulation of blood in the joint following a trauma, there is a scope of aspirating the blood and giving a compression bandage. But if it is fluid accumulation caused by a sequel of trauma, we usually do not aspirate, unless there is an indication of infection or to detect a specific type of arthritis,” said the surgeon.
“Usually we do conventional treatment by either medicine, rehabilitation or surgery to treat the original cause of the fluid accumulation. We do not aspirate the fluid because one of the commonest complications of aspiration is infection,” the surgeon pointed out.
Mamata had reportedly last gone to SSKM for the treatment of an injury to her left knee on September 24. An official there said she had suffered an injury to her already injured left knee and a series of tests, including an MRI, was conducted on her. Doctors advised rest for 10 days.
Mamata suffered an injury during a visit to Spain in September. Earlier, in July, she had undergone microsurgery at SSKM to reduce pain in the left knee following an injury while getting off a chopper after an emergency landing near Siliguri in June.
Asked whether the health department would probe the chief minister’s allegation, state health secretary Narayan Swaroop Nigam refused to comment. “I have nothing to say on this,” he said.
Several calls from this newspaper to Monimoy Bandyopadhyay, director of the Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research (SSKM Hospital), went unanswered throughout Thursday. He did not reply to WhatsApp messages either.