Lying on an iron cot in a room with a single wooden door, 30-year-old Cherjarla Shankar struggles for words. His speech is interspersed with rhythmic beeps from a mechanical ventilator from which a breathing tube is inserted through his neck into the wind pipe.
The man has been on ventilator for the last eight years. Drawing strength from his family, comprising wife and mother, Shankar lives on to find himself walk again.
His one-room house has a leaking roof, and the family has not even a white ration card.
Doctors who treated Shankar gasp at his indomitable spirit and attribute it to the love and support of his family members. Friends and philanthropists continue to support his family. An IT employee sponsors Shankar’s son’s education, and while another person donated a mechanical ventilator. It was a tracheostomy performed eight years ago that keeps him alive.
“I do not want to die. I want to live and take care of my family. If I die, who will look after my wife, my ageing mother and my seven-year-old son?” Shankar asks, with tears welling up in his eyes.
Shankar talks of his life as a successful Rural Medical Practioner (RMP) in his village, but he breaks down as he recollects the traumatic moments when he collapsed on a bed after suffering a twitching pain in his knees during his son’s birthday celebrations in March 2007.
The next morning, he woke up to find himself in the ICU of a private hospital in Guntur. Doctors confirmed that Shankar had been diagnosed with myelitis quadriplegia, a rare neurological disorder that left him paralysed with a respiratory failure later.
“The weakening of the phrenic nerve has paralysed the functioning of Shankar’s diaphragm, resulting in respiratory failure. His spinal cord is also paralysed. There are few people who survive on life support for years,” said senior neurologist at GGH, Guntur, Sundarachary.
Shankar on ventilator for last eight years, is battling with a rare neurological disorder
