The 3-day-old boy was marooned at Vidyavihar station by his mother; he was diagnosed with haemorrhage and treated at two civic hospitals; this is the third abandoned infant to die at the hospital in past one-and-half months
Yet another case of an infant being abandoned by a mother has come to the fore. An unidentified woman left her wailing three-day-old infant at Vidyavihar railway station this month.
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“On November 17, the woman, who is yet to be identified, came to platform number 2 of Vidyavihar railway station and handed her baby to a 10-year-old girl, who was waiting for her train to arrive. She asked her to hold her baby for a while, and then fled from the station while the girl continued to wait for her to return,” said Shivaji Dhumal, senior police inspector, Kurla Government Railway Police (GRP).
The young girl handed over the baby to GRP officials, who took him to KB Bhabha Hospital at Kurla, where he underwent treatment for a week. He was then shifted to Sion Hospital, as it has better facilities. There, doctors diagnosed the boy with a large intracranial haemorrhage after conducting a CT scan. Despite treatment, he died when he was 14-days-old, in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of the hospital.
Dr Jayashree Mondekar, head of the neonatology department at Sion Hospital, said, “We are unsure of the cause of the bleeding inside the skull, as there were no visible injuries on his body. However, physical trauma or head injury is not the only possible cause. It could also have been a stroke. He had to be put on ventilator support for two days, as he was unable to breathe. He succumbed as the haemorrhage was large, which could also mean he had another underlying illness.”
The baby’s body was shifted to the hospital morgue, which already has the unclaimed bodies of two other infants who had been abandoned at the hospital while undergoing treatment in the NICU. They died on October 18 and November 19. MiD DAY had reported about the two incidents. The GRP officials are yet to recover CCTV footage of the incident and release a sketch of the woman to track her down. u00a0