For the first time in the city, doctors at a Mulund hospital used a machine to support the heart of a 10-month-old child as they operated on it. The boy suffered from a rare condition that had severely reduced his heart functions and enlarged it.
The boy was brought to Fortis Hospital with breathlessness and fatigue. While he was immediately taken in for operation, he suffered a major heart attack. Doctors said his heart was functioning at just five per cent, as against 50 to 60 per cent in a normal kid.
Doctors said the child had suffered multiple attacks since birth as he did not have a left pulmonary artery. Instead, the heart had a branch of the coronary artery, which carries impure blood, on the left side. The condition, known as Anomalous Coronary Artery, is seen in one in three lakh live births and forms 0.25- 0.5 % of total congenital heart defects.
During the five-hour surgery – half-switch operation – doctors connected the faulty artery to pulmonary artery to ensure supply of pure blood to the heart. All the while, they used an LVAD (left ventricular assist device), a pump-like device having the size of the heart of a 12-year-old child, to keep the heart pumping.
Dr Vijay Agarwal, chief pediatric surgeon, said, "The defect caused his heart to receive insufficient blood supply and he developed dilated cardiomyopathy where the heart lost its elasticity and became bigger. His heart size was as big as the heart of an adult."
According to the doctors, such children need to be operated in one or two months after they are born but in this case, the diagnosis was late.
"His heart was damaged because of repeated attacks. It is a miracle that he survived so long. Generally, we operate on such patients followed by prescribing medications that are required to support the heart till it returns to normal functioning. But in this case, the child's heart was very weak so we decided to use the device for the first time," said Dr Agarwal.
The baby is currently recovering in the paediatric ICU and will be discharged soon, said hospital authorities.
For the parents of the child, it is like a rebirth. The hospital also helped the family in arranging money as his father is a cook and couldn't afford the cost of surgery. "The child was referred by Sion hospital. The cost of the surgery was around Rs 4lakh so we helped them raise the money with the hlep of NGOs," said Dr Agarwal.
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