KOLKATA: It was on September 5 that
Snehalata Kundu
had suddenly realized that she had lost her stomach.There was
nothing physically wrong
with her, but having made up her mind that she didn't possess her stomach any longer, she quit eating and started starving to death.
May sound uncannily similar to Sukumar Ray's 'Moustache Thievery', but doctors at the
Institute of Psychiatry
were taken aback when the dying 65-year-old was wheeled into the ward.
“How can I eat? My stomach is missing,“ she would mutter. As “proof “ of the vanished gut, she would throw up every time her family members tried to force feed her.
In a matter of days, Snehalata lost 10kgs, then 20, and by the time she was in the nursing home's ITU, she was all skin and bones. She developed bed sores and other ailments, including flu and cold (for sudden lack of immunity), and kept drifting in and out of consciousness. She had lost her ability to speak.
“When her sons came to us, saying that the nursing home had identified the malady as a bizarre delusion, we decided to give it a shot,“ said Pradeep Saha, head of the Institute of Psychiatry . Saha and his team diagnosed “systemized encapsulated delu sional disorder in a case of mutism with double incontinence“. The patient's excretory system had collapsed, along with her ability to consume food. She was put on Ryles tube and catheters.
The doctors have found a similarity between the syndrome that is characterized by distorted perceptions of time and space similar to what Alice experienced in
Lewis Carroll
's ` Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. Patients with `Alice-in-wonderland syndrome' describe seeing or feeling objects or parts of their bodies as smaller or bigger than their actual sizes, in an altered shape or in complete disappearance. The rare syndrome could be caused by viral infections, epilepsy or migraine headaches.
“Two types of brain impairment are associated with delusion. The first alters the patient's normal functioning.The second, responsible for the patient's lack of reasoning, encourages her to hold on tightly to her outlandish beliefs,“ Saha explained.
Over the last week, Snehalata's delusion has lifted completely . Barely audible, she told TOI, “They tell me I had lost my stomach. Thank god, everything is fine now.“
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