The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Nail recovered from child’s bronchus

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Tuesday, Feb 05, 2008
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Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Nail recovered from child’s bronchus

Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A team of paediatric surgeons at SAT hospital performed an emergency surgery on a one-and-a-half-year-old girl in the early hours on Monday to remove a two-inch nail from inside her right bronchus (one of the main airways to the lungs).

The little girl, Anitha, daughter of Selvadurai of Kalakkode, Nagercoil, is recuperating in the Paediatric Surgery ICU and will be discharged in another two days.

The child, who had acute respiratory distress, had been brought to the SAT hospital with referrals from two hospitals in Nagercoil. The X-ray and CT scan reports from these hospitals had confirmed the presence and exact position of the nail in the child’s airway.

A team of paediatric surgeons led by K. Ajayakumar, Associate Professor, performed the bronchoscopic surgery on the child to remove the nail. The surgery, though it lasted for only half an hour, had a certain amount of risk because of the object lodged in the airway and as the child had to be under general anaesthesia, doctors said.

Dr. Ajayakumar said that though they performed bronchoscopy on a fairly regular basis to remove nuts or other foreign objects such as buttons from children’s throat or airways, this was the first time that a two-inch long nail was recovered from a child’s airway.

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