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She stayed awake during a heart surgery!
Our Bureau
Bangalore
,
Sept. 10
LAST Monday, this Bangalorean was wide awake and literally chatting away as doctors performed a major heart surgery on her. She was up and about by Friday, to talk about it to the media and describe how well she now felt.
According to Dr B.G. Muralidhara, Chairman of Trinity Hospital & Heart Foundation and Chief of Cardiology, the awake heart surgery (AHS) method done under local anaesthesia is a recent medical breakthrough though this could easily be the first time that it was performed in India for pericardioctomy.
Ms Sudha (name changed), in her 40s, had a crippling heart condition called constrictive pericarditis, caused by a tuberculosis-related infection that she contracted many years ago.
Complications during a back surgery last year ensured that she could not be given total anaesthesia nor be put on the ventilator as the previous surgery had rendered her windpipe narrow and weak. "So, we decided on the AHS method on her," said Dr Muralidhara.
The complex surgery involved removing the pericardium, the thin lining around the heart.
In Ms Sudha's case, the lining had become very thick, like a bony cage, and was disrupting normal heart functions. In routine operations the pericardium is removed under total anaesthesia and the patient is put under a ventilator.
In this case, the anaesthesia was administered through a small plastic tube inserted in Ms Sudha's back, according to Dr Muralidhara and his colleague and cardiac surgeon at Trinity, Dr Venugopal Ramrao.
The spinoff benefit, according to the doctors, is that AHS reduces the cost of surgery and hospitalisation by 30 per cent.
While the stay after a routine surgery lasts 20-30 days, Ms Sudha may be walking out of Trinity in just seven days after the surgery. Her ICU stay was also down to a few hours.
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