A tumour surgery of a two-year-old kid carried out at a Kochi hospital exemplifies the advancement in the field of medicine that is now aiding doctors save more precious lives.
One such incident relates to two-year-old Aadhi, who was taken to the VPS Lakeshore Hospital in Kochi where he got operated in Eid day. His parents, who have been working in Dubai for the last 10 years, took him to a nearby hospital when he developed fever recently. It was here that the presence of a tumour in Aadhi’s heart was detected.
The doctors there found that the child was in an extremely critical condition as 95 per cent of the blood circulation was blocked by the tumour and was breathless.
Back home, doctors were able to save Aadhi through a surgery that would have been rendered as impossible until a few years ago. The heartbeat and brain activity of the kid were stopped for 40 minutes and the body temperature was brought down to as low as 15 degree Celsius.
According to a report in The Times of India, in the nine-hour-long surgery, doctors used deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA), a technique in which the body teamperature was brought down to 15 degree Celsius, in order to remove a 200 gm cancerous tumour that had grown inside and outside a two-year-old boy’s heart.
Having an intracardiac yolk sac germ cell tumour in the heart, a condition which is very rare, the kid named Aadhi Thoppil Fabeer was declared clinically dead during the operation, which was carried out by a team of 30 doctors.
“The surgery was the fifth such successful surgery performed in the world,” The Times of India quoted Dr M K Mossa Kunhi, who lead the team that operated the boy at the VPS Lakeshore Hospital, as saying.
“In all the four other cases, the tumour was reported inside the heart but in this case the tumour was inside and outside the surface of the heart,” he further added.
The yolk sac tissue usually develops on the third of pregnancy and gets dissolved within a month. However, in this case, it developed into a cancerous tumour.
“It is a very rare condition and I have not seen one such case in my career. It is an extremely difficult surgery to perform as the tumour infiltrates the heart muscle and comes out. Chemotherapy will help burn residual tumour, if any,” said Dr Jose Chacko Periappuram, cardia surgeon at Lisie Hospital.
He is doing fine now and needs chemotherapy course once in three weeks about 3 to 4 times.
