Bhubaneswar: A villager in Odisha found that he was fathering his neighbour’s son as his own. However, it took him 20 years to discover his wife’s adultery during the treatment of his son, who is suffering from a hereditary disease.
According to a media report, the man’s 18-year-old son started complaining of frequent joint pain a few months ago. The man took his son to various doctors, but none could diagnose the ailment.
He then took the lad to Fortis hospital in Gurgaon. There, tests revealed that he was suffering from sickle cell anaemia. The doctors said bone marrow transplant was the only treatment for the hereditary disease.
According to experts, sickle cell anaemia is passed on to a child from both the mother and father.
“If a child is diagnosed with sickle cell anaemia, it means that both parents should have a defect in one pair of chromosomes. It is medically impossible that one parent has a defective chromosome and the other doesn’t have but their offspring have this disease,” Senior Haematologist Dr Rahul Bhargava was quoted as saying by Outlook.
Dr Bhargava, who attended the patient, advised the parents to undergo a test to see if they carried the defective chromosome responsible for their son’s condition.
Surprisingly, the defect was detected in the woman, but not in her husband. A second test confirmed the result.
The doctor realised that the woman was the patient’s mother, but the man was not the father. He told the truth to the man.
Shocked and shaken, the man confronted his wife. The woman broke down and confessed that she had been having an affair with another man in the neighbourhood.
Her confessions were reconfirmed after the man realised that his wife’s lover also suffered from sickle cell anaemia.
