MUMBAI: Dr Rohan Mhamunkar (35), assaulted by the relatives of an accident victim in Dhule on Sunday, is back home in Mumbai to seek treatment for his grave injuries.
“I wish I had taken up engineering instead of medicine. I qualified for both courses,” said the doctor, who is waiting to meet JJ Hospitaldean Dr T P Lahane-anauthority in ophthalmology-for an opinion on Wednesday morning.
Dr Mhamunkar has reason to worry, according to Dr Lahane. “His brain scan shows a fracture in the left eye orbit. The fracture is not in itself worrisome, but it could affect his optic nerve and that could lead to vision loss,” said Dr Lahane.
The doctor is predictably shaken. “I don’t have a clear memory of the events that occurred on Sunday night. There were many men attacking me for stating that their relative should be taken to a centre that had a neurologist or neurosurgeon,” he said. They took his two mobile phones and broke them into pieces.
Dr Mhamunkar, who passed out of K J Somaiya Medical College, completed his DNB in orthopaedics from Jupiter Hospital, Thane, before taking up the Dhule stint as a senior resident doctor. “I wanted experience in a rural setting, but I, and my parents, have now suffered the worst experience of our lives,” said the Kandivli resident, who would like to stay far away from Dhule right now.
It was his mother who egged him on to take medicine. “She has worked in hospitals in a clerical capacity and wanted me to be a doctor,” he said. The first thing she conveyed to him after Sunday’s incident was that she wished she hadn’t asked him to take up medicine.
As things stand now, the 35-year-old doctor could lose vision in an eye even as doctors across the state have charted out a silent protest on Wednesday to seek better security for themselves in government hospitals. The state chapter of the Indian Medical Association’s youth wing states that 47 instances of assault against doctors occurred in Maharashtra in 2016.