Tollygunge doc recounts his tryst with tragedy
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Kolkata: When surgery PGT doctor Biplab Pal and his colleagues at Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad stepped out of their hostel — barely 500m from the hostel on which the Air India 787-8 Dreamliner crashed — to join duty on Thursday morning, little did they know that the day would be etched in their memory forever.
Pal was inside the urosurgery operation theatre, when he got the first indication of the catastrophe. "We heard a loud blast. Someone called one of my seniors, telling him his hostel was on fire. But even till then, we had no inkling of what had happened. It was only after we finished our OT duty that we learnt about the crash. From the doctors' room, we could see thick smoke billowing out of the hostel," said Pal, whose home is in Tollygunge.
Even before the doctors could figure out the extent of the incident and its impact, they were instructed to rush to the Trauma Centre of the hospital. They could barely reach the Trauma Centre, when ambulances started streaming in. "Patients were wheeled in one after another. Most of them were charred. No sign of life was left in them. Then, the injured were brought in, many of them known faces. Some had burn injuries, some came in with dismembered body parts, while others had fractures.
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We did everything we could to stabilise them," Pal told TOI over phone.
Pal was among the doctors who were the first to attend to Viswashkumar Ramesh, the lone survivor. "At that point, we didn't know he was the only passenger of the fateful flight who had survived. He had abrasions near his left eye and superficial burns on the back of his left hand. But his vital parameters were stable. He even borrowed my charger to charge his phone as he was getting frantic calls from his family," Pal said.
Ramesh is being treated at C7 ward of Trauma Centre.
Even Pal's phone did not stop buzzing as the news flashed on mobile phones across the country. But busy attending to the crash victims, he couldn't take the calls. "I somehow managed to call my father to tell him I was safe," he said.
Back in Kolkata, his father, Biswanath Pal, a schoolteacher, was taking class when someone told him about the crash. He got a call from his son even before he could connect with him. "My son's hostel is 500 m from the one on which the plane crashed. We are lucky but what happened is heart-breaking. Reading about the death of my son's junior colleagues, whom he often spoke about, is devastating," Biswanath said.
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