The Hindu : New Delhi News : Small baby, small scar, fast recovery

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, May 15, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

Small baby, small scar, fast recovery

Staff Reporter

Landmark operation saves infant

NEW DELHI: Five-month old Gungun is a special child in more ways than one. She created medical history of sorts adding her name to the list of a hand-full of children across the world who have been successfully operated upon to block a hole in the diaphragm to prevent her stomach from slipping into her chest cavity.

An operation previously performed only on adult patients using a laparoscopic procedure, the same was done on little Gungun on Tuesday. And now a happy and fast recovering baby girl has gone back home 48-hours after her surgery with minimal scar and a healthy chance at leading a normal life.

Giving details of the case, senior consultant and paediatric surgeon at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, Anurag Krishna, said: "The child was referred to us from an East Delhi hospital and we proposed to her parents about performing a laparoscopic surgery to push back the stomach and block the wide opening in her diaphragm.

We also made them understand that this was a rare case and failure to work out the problem would lead to the child having frequent chest infection, the contents of the stomach spilling out through the food pipe and also retarded growth.''

"The operation was tedious and is usually done only in adults. But we opted to operate upon the child because it would help us to not open her abdominal area and manually push back the stomach to its right place to reduce the space in the diaphragm.

We thought the child would do well with the never before done operation and we were confident about how it would turn out. It is a complicated and dangerous operation but we want to tell the common man that the facility is available and that they need not stick to the traditional mode of surgery,'' added Dr. Krishna.

It took a team of five top surgeons and technical staff two and half hours to perform the operation. "The operation was complicated because the child needed to be monitored more carefully and also there was not enough space for the surgeon to work, even with the miniature equipments it was difficult. The advantages include faster recovery and smaller scar,'' said Dr. Krishna.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

New Delhi