Cow Dung – Treating Bone Injury

Rasik Lal a 70 year old veteran narrates this incident which happened with him some 55 years back.

Rasik Lal must have been adolescent than in the age of thirteen or fourteen.

Rasik Lal tells, I used to go to pathshala (primary village school) with my elder brother on a bicycle. We had to cycle almost 3km to reach the school each morning. My brother being elder always hiked me on the cycle. It so happened one day, as we were going to the school, I felt something wet and liquid running down my knee while I was sitting on the carrier of my brother’s bicycle.

I thought it must be water leaking from my water bottle kept in the school bag. As we  bicycled some 300 meters more I started feeling severe pain in my leg right below the knee joint. I told my brother that something is wrong with my leg who immediately stopped to have a look. He was horrified to find that my leg had become entangled in the spokes of the bicycle and the muscle of the knee joint had ruptured open. It was bleeding profusely and he didn’t know how to disentangle the leg out of the spokes.

He ran and called for help from nearby fields where several farmers were ploughing the field. They somehow took out the entangled leg from the spokes and took me to the nearest medical help available. The doctor at the dispensary dressed my leg and referred me to the city civil hospital. I was taken to the hospital where the doctors informed my father that I had to undergo a surgery for which I was hospitalised for weeks. The doctors at the hospital finally discharged me and asked my father to bring me back for routine checkup after 3 weeks.

Unfortunately when the doctors opened the dressing, to their dismay they found that it had developed gangrene. They advised amputation.

My father did not take this advice and bought me back home. He told my mother what doctors had said. My mother was sad but had complete faith in her Goseva. She told my father that whatever is destined can’t be avoided but let me give a try to save the boy.

From the very next day she started my treatment. She would give me bath and make me sit on a wooden stool in our cow shed. Then she would pray to gaumata and collect her fresh urine and dung. Then she would wash my wound with the gomutra and tie gomaya on it with clean, thin muslin cloth. This went on for four months. Slowly the wound started healing and ultimately my leg was completely healed. The most amazing aspect of the story is that now only a scar is left where the muscle was severed from the joint.

I have since then never left serving, protecting and maintaining the gaumata.