Former Indian cricketer Vinod Kambli, who complained of unbearable chest pain while driving, was rushed by a circumspect woman traffic police officer to lilavati Hospital at Bandra in north-west Mumbai just in time.
Forty-one-year-old Kambli was driving a white Pajero from Chembur in north-east Mumbai to his Bandra residence, when he developed massive chest pain and pulled up his vehicle by the roadside at Sion on the Eastern Express Highway at around 10 am.
“When he stopped his Pajero near the Highway Apartments at Sion, Kambli was seen suffering from severe chest pain. Seeing this one of my constables called me. I instructed my people at the traffic control room on walkie-talkie to clear the road towards Bandra. Fortunately, we could reach him to the hospital in the nick of time,” Sujata Patil, a senior police inspector of Matunga Traffic Division told The Pioneer.
“He (Kambli) was in tears. He was saying: I am going to die, please save me… He was not in a condition where he could have been taken to the hospital in a police vehicle. That’s why I asked my constable (a police driver) to take Kambli to the lilavati Hospital in his own car,” Patil said.
At the hospital, Kambli was kept under observation at the Cardiac ICU. “He is now stable,” his wife Andrea Kambli said in a statement issued from the hospital.