Amid ongoing pandemic, city-based doctors have performed a rare curative surgery which helped a 36-year-old Surat resident to live the rest of his life without respiratory distress or without a heart-lung transplant.
Since the year 2012, Bhaveshbhai Sabhadia who works in a diamond factory has been struggling to breathe following which he needed oxygen support for the last two years. The surgery was recently performed by a team of advanced cardiac sciences at Sir HN Reliance Foundation Hospital and he is stable and healthy.
“He was unable to walk a few steps or sleep at night and had to be on and off hospitalised for water accumulation in the abdomen region. He was told that heart-lung transplant was the only treatment option,” said a doctor.
Dr Anvay Mulay, director cardiac surgery and heart transplant, Sir HNRFH said they had to evaluate his health condition and diagnosed him with chronic thrombus pulmonary embolism (CTPEH), a condition wherein the patient has high blood pressure in the lungs’ arteries. They also found that his right side of the heart was severely damaged and the blood pressure in the lung vessels was four times more than the normal.
“CTPEH is a rare and severe form of pulmonary hypertension (PH) which goes undiagnosed in most cases. In Bhaveshbhai’s case too, it was diagnosed late leading to severe damage to his heart. Following which we decided to go for Pulmonary endarterectomy surgery instead of the heart-lung transplant,” he said.
Though it was one of the high risk and challenging surgery, doctors managed to remove the old blood clots from the pulmonary arteries in the lungs and reduce the blood pressure inside the pulmonary arteries.
Post the surgery, doctors were happy to see the right side heart responding well and showing remarkable improvement.
“In Bhavesh's case, it was a level 3-4 CTPEH making it technically a difficult surgery. It was heartening to see a terminally ill patient, who was waiting for a heart-lung transplant, walk home with his own organs,” Dr Mulay said.
What makes this surgery successful (apart from the skilled clinical team) is the presence of state-of-the-art technologies like suspended animation, intraoperative transesophageal echocardiogram, inhaled nitric oxide, cerebral oximetry etc.
