A Girl Bleeds Without Any Cuts- Puzzles Doctors
This is an unbelievable condition of a little girl, which is giving the doctors a tough time to even explain let alone cure it.
Thirteen years old Twinkle Dwivedi, is daughter of a Raliway worker & hails from a small town in Uttar Pradesh, India. She was just like any other normal girl till last year when all of a sudden she complained of bleeding which soon became so frequent as to occur between five and twenty times a day. The puzzle for doctors is that she doesn’t have a single wound or cut on her body. The blood seeps through her pores, eyes, nose, hairline, neck and the soles of her feet .
Her parents are quite worried and her mother said, “I am very worried about her. She is very weak and pale from the blood loss. She is very isolated and depressed. She wants to get better so she can go back to school.”
Her parents, along with the doctors, have also tried to seek help from Godmen of many religions all of whom have failed to provide any cure. Her father says, “One doctor even accused us of making it up. Why on earth would we do that?”
Seeing no solution coming from local medical help, his father turned to All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, where doctors decided that she had Type 2 Platelet Disorder, a rare condition where blood is dangerously low in clotting particles.This is making her blood very watery - but they are still clueless about the treatment to make it thicker.
However, Consultant haematologist Dr Drew Provan, of Barts Hospital in London has offered a different explanation & said that she may have Type II von Willebrand disease which arises from a deficiency of von Willebrand factor (vWF), a protein that is required for platelet adhesion. For a cure, Dr. Provan advises, that she should see a coagulation doctor for treatment.
Meanwhile, for the family of the little girl, the problems do not end here. They have another type of challenge to face parallely. At home, the villagers think she is cursed. "People throw stones at her home and shout cruel things at her in the street", family reports, "the situation is getting critical." Schools have thrown the girl out & society is cutting corners.
Will the medical science come up with a solution to help the child & to prove superiority of science over superstition ?