The COVID-19 pandemic has brought Nagaland’s Aneile Kenye back home after more than 11 years in an intensive care unit (ICU).
Ms. Kenye, 50, was discharged from the Naga Hospital Authority Kohima on March 30 after the State government decided to convert it into a novel coronavirus-specific hospital.
She was shifted to a house adjoining the hospital that her husband — martial artist and writer Okenjeet Sandham — had rented to stay close to her.
“We are happy that she has come home but at the same time worried because there’s a difference between her room and the ICU. The decision to move patients out of the hospital was quite sudden and must have created problems for other patients and their attendants,” Mr. Sandham told The Hindu from Kohima on Wednesday.
The hospital provided him with an a portable suction machine for draining out deposits in his wife’s windpipe, where a tracheostomy pipe has been inserted to help her breathe. This was after he failed to get one at medical equipment stores in Kohima, affected by the countrywide lockdown.
“I want to turn the room into a mini ICU. I hope the situation (because of lockdown) allows me to at the earliest,” he said.
Ms. Kenye collapsed on August 30, 2009, a year after she became the first Indian woman to officiate in an international Muay Thai competition in South Korea. She was diagnosed with brain tumour and had to be air-lifted to Guwahati for surgery at a neurological hospital.
The hospital discharged her after 41 days but she was confined to a wheelchair in Kohima. She collapsed again three weeks later and had to be admitted to the ICU at the Naga Hospital.
“We have struggled to meet the expenditure but never let others know what we were going through. She cannot speak and we don’t know if she can see us, although her eyes look normal. I have not left her side because I am what I am today because of her. I am just trying to pay back for the sacrifices she made for me, our daughter and son,” Mr. Sandham said.
The two had married in 1986.
