WASHINGTON: An Indian-American cardiac surgeon who successfully performed open heart surgery on a one-week old baby with a heart the size of a grape is the toast of both the medical community and the infant's mother, who is herself a paediatrician.
Dr V Mohan Reddy, whose fame as a paediatric cardiac surgeon preceded this success, took on the difficult case after doctors in Southern California gave week-old Jerrick De Leon zero chance of surviving a condition known as "transposition of the great arteries," which disrupts oxygenated blood supply because of crossed blood vessels.
The condition can be corrected by an arterial switch procedure, but what made Jerrick's case dicey was that he was born more than 13 weeks early and weighed only 700 grams, or slightly more than 1.5 pounds, at the time of his surgery.
Even his mother Maria Lourdes was in despair considering Leon's survival at birth itself was a miracle. His premature birth at 26.5 weeks gestation was necessitated by her severe pre-eclampsia, a dangerous spike in a pregnant woman's blood pressure that can be fatal to both mother and baby.
But the SoCal doctors referred Leon's case to the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, where Dr Reddy had successfully performed a different cardiac repair on a newborn Serena Brown,
who weighed only 640 grams at the time of her surgery in 2001. At the time she was believed to be the smallest child ever to undergo open-heart surgery.
Dr Reddy operated on Jerrick two days after he was airlifted to LPCH on February 4. The procedure was performed without stopping the baby's circulation so that his fragile brain would continue receiving blood. Together with his being premature and tiny, it made the process technically even more difficult.
"Babies this premature are very fragile, with extremely delicate tissue," Dr Reddy, who did his medical training at Kakatiya University, Warangal, and surgical residency at AIIMS, Delhi, explained on Thursday after Jerrick was declared safe. "It's necessary to scale down your hand and arm movements to achieve a very fine degree of accuracy."
He said everyone involved in the operation is extremely cautious and the procedure goes very slowly. What would normally take three hours takes four to five in a baby this small.
The procedure went well enough that Jerrick has been moved from the hospital's specialized cardiac care unit to the neonatal intensive care unit, where he can recuperate with other tiny 'preemies', -- premature babies. Barring unrelated complication, he is now expected to have a normal lifespan.
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Nagesh Bhatcar [EMAIL PROTECTED]
