Nigerian girl undergoes complex surgery
A team led by Dr Zeena Makhija performed complex surgery like cone’s repair and bidirectional glenn procedure and ASD closure in which her valve was repaired, and an alternative pathway was created to shift blood directly into lungs for purification and take the load off her newly-repaired heart. Also, the hole in her heart was closed in the same procedure.
Hyderabad: One of the world's complex medical surgeries has been performed successfully on a13-year-old Nigerian girl Agatha, who also made a quick recovery out of it.
Agatha was born with rare and multiple heart conditions.
The girl was detected with a very abnormal right side heart valve called Ebstein's Anomaly where the valve is abnormal and leaks profusely and is a rare severe deformation of the tricuspid valve between the right atrium and right ventricle (the two chambers on the right side of the heart).
Her tricuspid valve was displaced and was lowered than it should be. The right side of the heart was severely enlarged and blood was leaking back due to inadequate valve function leading to severe heart failure.
She also had an Atrial Septal Defect (ASD) which means that she had a hole between her two upper chambers which was allowing the blood to pass between right and left side of the heart.
The paediatric cardiology team of CARE Hospitals gave a new lease of life to the teenaged girl, who comes from a lower middle-class family.
Dr ZeenaMakhija,Pediatric Cardiac Surgeon at CARE Hospitals, Banjara Hills, said, "Nigeria has very limited facilities for congenital heart surgeries.
She struggled with repeated infections and hospital admissions since birth and was evaluated by various international teams over the course of years.
At one such mission, she was evaluated by Dr ZeenaMakhija in 2018 along with her colleagues and the mission's team from the UK.
She was advised for surgical repair and was finally shifted to CARE Hospitals, Banjara hills and underwent a complex surgery.
Now she has resumed playing and joined her studies back after a gap of 6 years.
It is heart-warming to see a child who came to us on wheelchair unable to walk even 10 steps without getting breathless, get back to her normal life."
The surgery was done under a team led by Dr ZeenaMakhijawhich involved performing a cone's repair and bidirectional glenn procedure and ASD closure in which her valve was repaired, and an alternative pathway was created to shift blood directly into lungs for purification and take the load off her newly-repaired heart.
Also the hole in her heart was closed in the same procedure.
She was taken off the ventilator on the second day after surgery and was discharged from the hospital in 11 days inspite of challenges that the team faced during her recovery.
