A city-based orthopaedist recently took a large piece of bone out of the leg of a 14-year-old Lucknow girl and implanted it in her arm.
You’ve heard of people willing to offer an arm and a leg for something they covet. But a city-based orthopaedist recently took a large piece of bone out of the leg of a 14-year-old Lucknow girl and implanted it in her arm, giving her back the full use of her arm. The procedure is called vascularised tubular bone graft.
Dr BS Rajput, consultant orthopaedic and joint replacement surgeon at Cumballa Hill Hospital, performed the 10-hour surgery on Vasundhara in mid-January.
“A piece of the bone from the leg, with blood vessels intact and supply, was taken out and put in the upper part of the arm to join the bones which were not aligned,” explained Dr Rajput, adding, “since the patient is an adolescent, the bone in her leg will grow back.”
“It was difficult as the patient has had several previous surgeries. Her right arm had not grown at all. In fact, it was just 50 per cent of the length of the other arm,” said Dr Rajput.
According to him, post-surgery, the Std VII student will be able to raise her arm and even use her right arm for writing in three months. Ironically, it was due to alleged medical negligence that Vasundhara had lost the use of her arm for 12 years.
“At the age of two, she developed a high fever, which was diagnosed as malaria. But we started suspecting that something was amiss when we noticed she was unable to raise her arm,” said Vasundhara’s father Satishchandra Sharma, a UP government employee posted in Lucknow.
Her illness was wrongly diagnosed as polio and treatment was started. “But a day later, there was swelling in her shoulder which progressed to her entire hand and even to the fingers. We rushed to the orthopaedist who said it was a bone infection,” said Sharma.
The bone infection was so severe that the blood in her hand turned blue. A team of surgeons in Aligarh then operated and removed the entire bone from the elbow up to the shoulder.
“They left the scapula (the shoulder joint) and a little bit of bone at the elbow and removed the entire bone from the upper arm,” said Sharma. That was the last time Vasundhara used her arm.
s_deepa@dnaindia.net
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