Mumbai : Dr Milind P Chitley, the Andheri-based family physician, prominent mountaineer and co-founder of Hills & Trails – a trekking agency – is among five doctors missing from Mumbai, including his wife Megha, who is a pathologist. Kalyan-based Swanand Subhedar’s senior citizen father Sunil Sudarshan Subhedar is part of Chitley’s group. An anxious Swanand told HT that he has lost all contact with his father since Wednesday evening. “His phone is unreachable.
While the Nepalese authorities have launched a multi-agency search and rescue operation to locate survivors and provide emergency relief, as the death toll has surpassed hundreds, with over 1,300 still reported missing, families and friends of the doctors and others are eagerly awaiting updates. Among the missing are Dr Anand Deshpande, who heads the blood bank of Hinduja Hospital, and his wife Dr Gayatri Deshpande, head of the department of gynaecology and obstetrics at Nanavati hospital.
A spokesperson for the hospital said, “We have reached out to the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu and received a list of rescued people, in which Dr Gayatri’s name does not figure. Officers from Max Hospitals (which manages Nanavati hospital) in Kathmandu are also trying to look for details.”Merchant’s daughter, who refused to disclose her name, said they were “very positive” about locating her father, another family from their building, and members of two other families from Vile Parle who were travelling with Hills & Trails.
The group led by Dr Chitley included tourists from other states as well, such as 33-year-old Arushi Gupta from Hyderabad, whose last known location was the Rasuwa Customs office along the Nepal-Tibet border. Chitley, 64, who travelled with his wife, also a doctor, has decades of experience trekking in the Himalayas, having started mountaineering in 1983-84 while still a student of medicine at Grant Medical College, and eventually completing the basic and advanced courses at the Mountaineering Institute of Darjeeling.
Through that expedition, he rescued climbers suffering from serious high-altitude medical issues, including pulmonary edema and hypothermia, said his anxious friends, waiting to hear from him. He also treated cases of frostbite and helped bring the affected climbers back to Mumbai for further treatment, said one of his friends.
He is in fact one of the few doctors in the country experienced in treating high-altitude illnesses, blending mountaineering with emergency medical care in the Himalayas – which he encapsulated in books on first aid and rescue. In fact, when he started conducting first-aid camps for mountaineers between 1990 and ’91, several mountaineering organisations invited him to conduct similar camps and programmes for them, which Chitley did without charging money.
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