Healing touch: Infant hurt in Air India crash has skin grafted from mother

For eight-month-old Dhyaansh, the youngest victim of the 12 June Air India plane crash, his mother not only turned saviour when she rescued him from the on-ground post-crash fire, but also provided her skin for grafts to treat his deep burn wounds.

The child, who suffered 36 per cent burns, is on the road to recovery as the skin of his mother, who also sustained 25 per cent burns, used for grafts helped in healing his wounds, as per doctors.

Skin grafts involve transplanting healthy skin to cover wounds, burns or areas damaged by surgery or disease and promote tissue growth to help a person heal.

The infant and his mother have been discharged from a private hospital in Ahmedabad following five weeks of intensive treatment and plastic surgery to restore the skin damaged by fire, doctors said on Monday.

The child's own skin along with his mother's skin grafts were used to treat his third-degree burn wounds, said Dr Rutvij Parikh, consultant plastic surgeon at K.D. Hospital.

When the Air India Boeing Dreamliner plane crashed into Ahmedabad's B.J. Medical College hostel-cum residential complex on 12 June, Dhyaansh and his mother Manisha Kachhadiya were in one of the affected buildings.

Dhyaansh's father Kapil Kachhadiya is taking a super-speciality MCh degree course in urology at B.J. Medical College attached to the Civil Hospital. At the time of the crash, he was at the hospital while his wife and son were in their allotted quarters.

Both of them suffered burn injuries in the horrific tragedy, which claimed 260 lives, including 241 persons on board the aircraft and others on the ground.

The magnitude of the crash and subsequent fire was such that despite being inside a flat, the heat caused burn injuries to Manisha, a homeopath, and Dhyaansh, Kapil said.

He said when the crash occurred, Manisha suffered injuries, but she picked up their son and managed to come out of the building.

After taking primary treatment at Civil Hospital, both were rushed to K.D. Hospital the same day in view of their severe injuries, said Dr Parth Desai, chief operating officer of the private medical facility.

According to Parikh, Manisha had suffered 25 burns on her arms, face and legs, while the infant suffered 36 per cent burns on his face and other parts of the body.

"Since some wounds were deep due to third-degree burns suffered by both the mother and son, we needed to perform the skin grafting procedure to cover those wounds," he said. "In this procedure, we take a thin layer of skin and graft it on the wound to cover it. The place from where the skin is taken gets healed with time and a new skin eventually covers it."

First, Manisha's own skin was grafted to heal her wounds, said Parikh, who performed the surgeries at K.D. Hospital. Subsequently, Parikh took skin from Manisha as well as Dhyaansh to cover his burn injuries, the plastic surgeon said.

"To cover Dhyaansh's wounds, we needed more skin because infants do not have much skin on their body. Thus, we used both Manisha and his skin to cover his wounds. Usually, a mother's skin is preferred in such cases," he said. "Both eventually recovered and were discharged a week back after five weeks of intensive treatment."

Apart from the mother-son duo, four other patients, all students of B.J. Medical College, were treated at K.D. Hospital, Desai said. "A total of six patients, including the mother-son duo, were admitted to our hospital after being injured in the plane crash. Among the four medical students, one had a fracture while another had a facial injury. But the most complicated case was of this mother-son duo," he added.