Tanya Singh

Ultimate Heart Surgery Performed in Jaipur on 4-Day-Old Blue Boy

 

Bangalore, Karnataka -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/23/2012 -- Recently, a 4-day old child, weighing just 2 and half kilograms, residing at Mansarovar in Jaipur, underwent a very complex and difficult open heart surgery called “The Arterial Switch Operation” (ASO) at the Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, Jaipur. This operation is considered, by most of the cardiac surgeons in the world, as the ultimate test of a surgeon’s skill, the maturity of the setup in terms of ICU facilities, care by staff, and state-of-art technology. This child was unfortunately born with a complex congenital heart defect called as Transposition of Great Arteries (TGA) where the right heart flows “black”(extremely de-oxygenated) blood to the whole body and also receives it back without oxygenation and the left heart flow keeps circulating in the lungs. This circulation is said to be “in-parallel” instead of normal in-series circulation.

When this child was brought to the team at Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital on 3rd March 2012, he was on 2nd day after birth, and his body was severely affected by lack of oxygen. As it was an emergent situation, Dr Anamika Mehta, a Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist performed a BAS for the child at 11 PM. Once the BAS was performed the child’s general health started improving. On 7th March 2012, the child was eventually operated by the team headed by the Director Cardiac Sciences of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital, Jaipur Dr Sandeep Attawar.

In this surgery, lasting roughly Six hours, the Aorta and Pulmonary arteries were “switched” to ensure in-series blood circulation. Thus permanently “curing” the child from the congenital defect he was born with.

The surgery is one aspect of treatment, what is equally important is to manage these children in intensive care unit, which requires a very sophisticated and dedicated group of multidisciplinary super specialists. The team consisting of Dr Prabhat Dutta, neonatal cardiac anaesthetist and intensivist, Dr Vijay Shankar, Neonatologist and other cardiac anaesthetist and intensivist made sure that the child recovers normally from such a complicated operation. The child has recovered well and has been discharged.

There are hardly three hospitals performing such a surgery in Delhi. Over all in India, hardly 8-10 centres perform this type of surgery safely, and NH, Jaipur is the only hospital to have performed 4 such operation in last 9 months in whole of Rajasthan. All these patients were surgical success. Within a short span, the Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospital has become a one stop, affordable and state of art hospital providing cardiac care to all groups of people right from few-days-old-children to octogenarians.