I would like to share an interesting story of a remarkable patient whom I have operated on visiting me after 15 years.
During the last phase of the separatist war in 2009, the Sri Lanka Army launched a humanitarian mission to rescue the Tamil civilians who got trapped in the no fire zone in Mulivaikkal, Mullaitivu district. The LTTE with their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran kept them as hostages and shot at any one trying to escape through the Nanthikadal lagoon to the Army controlled area.
A young couple had decided to escape with their newborn baby. The LTTE militants mercilessly shot at them injuring both mother and her 7-day-old baby, separating them.
Dr. Chandima Suriyaarachchi with the grown-up child and the mother
The mother was shot in her head and her nose had got destroyed with gunshot injuries. The baby was airlifted and transferred to my ward at the Lady Ridgeway Hospital. The baby had severe head and abdominal injuries. One of the bullets had entered from front and gone through the bladder and exited from behind near the spine and we did not expect him to survive as he had bled a lot.
I did several operations on him over three months and he made a remarkable recovery.
My staff took care of him very well and in fact, one of my junior female doctors volunteered to breast-feed the baby as she had a new born baby herself at the time.
I had to allocate staff to keep an eye on him, especially during the patient visiting hours as he was a very cute adorable baby all alone in a single cot without a guardian. The Police could not trace the parents and were presumed dead.
Six months later, we got to know a probable mother recovering following a coma and a complex plastic surgery in the nearby National Hospital, who also had been transferred from the war zone during the last stages of the war.
We had to get legal advice from the courts to identify the real biological mother and do “maternity DNA testing” as two other Tamil mothers with missing babies also came forward and claimed the baby as their own.
Later on, the Ministry of Defence did a documentary video “The Last Phase” based on this incident to counter-attack the narrative of “alleged war crimes committed by the Army” concocted by the Western media.
It was a pleasant surprise when the mother and son visited me recently. He is studying well in a leading boys’ school in Jaffna.
The writer is a senior surgeon at the Lady Ridgeway Children’s Hospital in Colombo
