Mumbai: An 11-year-old boy fell from a second-floor building in Ghatkopar on May 6. The impact shattered his skull and drove bone fragments into his right eyeball and brain. Yet, even a week after his hospital discharge, the boy shows no signs of paralysis, vision impairment or neurological damage.Doctors are calling the case “a stroke of luck”. Even after undergoing multiple reconstructive surgeries to repair his skull and facial bones, Shiv Thakar is expected to resume normal activities within a month.His father, Mahesh, said the incident happened while the child was playing with friends and went up to the second floor of Shubham Atlantis in Pant Nagar to retrieve a ball. “We live opposite that building. Part of the second floor should have been covered, but it has been left open without any barricade. There was some water on the floor too, my child slipped and fell from there,” he said.His initial statement to the police noted that the child was playing and accidentally fell. However, he added that he now plans to pursue a case of negligence against the housing society.Mahesh initially rushed his son to a local hospital before transferring him to LH Hiranandani Hospital, where he spent close to Rs 11 lakh on treatment.Dr Sachin Giri, a neurosurgeon at the hospital, said that in over a decade of working across govt and private tertiary hospitals, he never saw a patient survive such a severe fall. “The anterior part of his brain, the base of the skull, the frontal part of the skull and his eye sockets were all severely impacted. We had to reconstruct it all,” Dr Giri said.The soft-tissue repair of the nose and eyelid was performed by plastic surgeon Dr Dipesh Malviya.Dr Giri added that one can only speculate how the boy survived intact and went home walking, suggesting there may have been some disruption between the fall and the final impact. “But time was also of the essence. The plastic surgery and neuro teams worked together to finish all the procedures within six hours,” he said.
