Man in India travels 60 hours in ambulance due to lockdown in country

GUWAHATI: A school teacher from Assam, who had gone to Apollo Hospitals in Chennai for the treatment of his father and got stranded there because of the lockdown, has covered a distance of 2,700 km in an ambulance to reach home in Bongaigaon district.

The 60-hour journey cost them 1,60,000 Indian Rupees in total.The man’s uncle, who had gone to the Tamil Nadu capital separately for a checkup, returned with them.

“My father has blockages in his heart. On March 4, I, along with my brother, took him to Chennai in a train ambulance. There, doctors found that he had problems in his kidney as well. He was recovering and our return flight to Guwahati was on March 18. But on March 17, my father’s health suddenly deteriorated and he had to be admitted to the ICU,” said Baharul Islam.

On March 30, doctors said he could be brought back home in an ambulance with ICU and oxygen supply provisions. Islam, with the help of his friend from Assam who works in Chennai, arranged an ambulance and started the journey the very next day.

“They charged me Rs 1.6 lakh for the ambulance. Along with my father, my uncle also came with us. There were two drivers and between them they drove for 23 hours each day. We started from the hospital at 10am on March 31 and reached home at 10pm on April 2,” Islam said.

“It wasn’t the best of the journeys for me…carrying two patients cramped in an ambulance from Chennai was an experience that I will never forget. But I am happy to be back home safe. We stopped a few times on the way to have food. We drove very fast as there was hardly any traffic,” Islam said.

Islam added that they were stopped by police twice — for about four hours in West Bengal and again for about two hours at Srirampur on the Assam-West Bengal border. “They checked our papers and let us go. As we reached Kajalgaon near our home, one of the drivers received a call to stop at the nearest hospital. All of us then went to the Kajalgaon Civil Hospital where doctors did a check-up and sent us, including the two drivers, to home quarantine for 14 days, which ended on April 16,” Islam added.