Students of different schools celebrate after the CBSE results were announced in Bhubaneswar on Monday. Telegraph pictures

Bhubaneswar, May 27: She could barely climb the stairs to the third-floor exam hall and as soon as she took a seat to catch her breath, a stream of blood oozed out of her nose.

Most 15-year-olds would have panicked but Priyanka Sahoo had become only too accustomed to the intermittent bleeding and pain over the past two years to just give up.

Shoving a big ball of cotton wool inside her nose, Priyanka, a student of DAV Public School (Chandrasekharpur) here, prayed to God for strength as she wrote the first paper of her CBSE Class XII boards. Down with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura — a case of isolated low platelet count — her condition fluctuated throughout the exams but she was determined to succeed despite the odds.

Today, when she saw 94.8 per cent on her mark sheet online, she couldn’t stop herself from crying.

“I was not sure of my performance and kept praying to God to help me secure pass marks. I have no words to describe how I am feeling today,” said Priyanka, who was first diagnosed with the rare medical condition in January 2011.

While the normal platelet count in adults ranges from 1.5 lakh to 4.5 lakh per micro litre of blood, Priyanka’s dropped to 60,000 in a matter of days.

“A doctor here told my parents that it could be blood cancer but after some very painful tests, that was ruled out. But they said I ran the risk of having a brain haemorrhage,” said Priyanka, who along with her parents, then left for Vellore for further advice.

“There the doctors assured us that I was alright and prescribed some steroids. But it had negative repercussions,” she said. Acnes and hair erupted on her face at a wild rate and she could not bear to see herself in the mirror.

She missed almost 80 per cent of her classes. One day, she put up a brave face and decided to go school. “One of my classmates asked me if I was really Priyanka. It was very distressing. I stopped meeting people after that,” she said.

Gradually, her condition went from bad to worse and she spent more time in hospitals than at home. “I passed blood in my urine for four months and became weak. That was just three months before my exams. Then homeopathic treatment brought it under control,” she said.

Though many people advised her to back out of the exams and appear next year, it was not an option for her. “In between medical check-ups, I found time to study,” she said.

Kidney battle

Another fighter is Prateek Panda, who had a kidney transplant just a few months before he took the CBSE Class XII exams and has scored 86 per cent marks. He was studying in Baripada when a long bout of jaundice last year took him down. “My mother noticed the symptoms but my father, a doctor, was not convinced. When I got very sick, they took me for a blood test which showed that the level of toxins in my body had shot up sharply,” he said.

Along with his mother and younger brother, he moved to Bhubaneswar for better medical care and enrolled in Mother’s Public School. “It kept aggravating and after undergoing a renal biopsy, I was told that I was suffering from a disease where proteins that helped the body fight infections settle in the kidneys. My blood pressure shot up and I used to experience blackouts,” said Prateek, who later had to go for dialysis.

Doctors in Chennai assured the family that he wouldn’t need a kidney transplant for the next 20 years but his condition started deteriorating and his pulse dropped to 29 beats a minute. “In six months, the blood flow to my kidneys had almost stopped and a transplant was required urgently. My mother donated one of her kidneys and saved my life,” he said. Though he was not allowed to study at a stretch of more than 30 minutes, he used to sit up during the night with his books and cry himself to sleep.

“It was a depressing period but I am happy that I could overcome it,” he said.

Do you have a similar story or know somebody who beat all odds to succeed in the exam called life? Tell us at ttorissa@abp.in