Tech Shout!

Hundreds of people flocked to a hospital in the eastern city of Calcutta on July 5, to see a patient holding a piece of his own skull that apparently fell off. 25 year old Sambhu Roy, an electrician had suffered from severe burns last October, after getting an electric shock while repairing a high voltage wire.

He has now become the centre of public attention and is known as the man who literally “holds his head in his hands”. Roy’s skull had come off, due to it being starved of blood. The doctor who treated him, surgeon Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay insists that his patient Roy went through an extremely rare medical phenomenon.

“When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burnt and within months it came off, exposing the skull,” surgeon Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay said. Later, we noticed that the part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the affected area, which can happen in such extensive burn cases.”

Bandyopadhyay said the skull’s inner covering and the membrane which helps produce bone was miraculously unaffected, allowing fresh bone to grow. “When the skull came off, I thought he will die, but we noticed a new covering on his head forming and that might have pushed the ‘dead skull’ out,” he said.

Doctors say that 80% of the outer part of Mr. Roy’s skull has now hardened and they expect him to be completely cured in around 3 months.
Some experts say that while such a development is possible, cases are extremely rare. “It’s most likely that the hard outer portion of the scalp came off,” a senior orthopaedic surgeon in Calcutta said. “If the skull itself came off with the brain of the patient being exposed, the patient wouldn’t have survived.”

Another surgeon, Mrinal Kanti Biswas, pointed out that no X-rays had yet been carried out on the patient. “Before scientific tests are conducted, it wouldn’t be proper to comment what exactly came off - whether it is the skull or the outer portion of the scalp,” he said.

Mr. Roy is in no doubt that his is a superb tale of survival. “Doctors say a new skull covering has replaced the old one, but I am not letting go of this one,” he mentioned. He said that he intended to keep his prized possession for life and not hand it over to the hospital when he left. “My skull has made me famous,” he said.