MIOT hospital saves woman from brink of death
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Ten days after she delivered a baby though a C-section in Vijayawada, 32-year-old Ms Sowjnya says she had felt a stabbing pain in her chest, as if her heart was being ripped out. A scan revealed that her aorta, the main blood vessel of the heart had torn due to an aneurysm, leaking blood from the organ.
She had less than 24 hours before the entire blood vessel burst and she bled to death. To make matters worse, she also had a heart attack.
“While surgery is the only option, the doctors in Vijayawada did not have the expertise to operate on her; they thus decided to send her in an ambulance to Chennai, on life support,” said senior cardiac surgeon Dr V.V. Bashi. “Sowjnya has Marfans syndrome, a genetic condition that leads to ballooning of the blood vessels,” he added.
People with Marfan’s syndrome are also unusually tall and may have vision problems. While very few centres are equipped to operate on a patient with a dissected aneurysm, diagnosing the critical condition is often a dilemma, even for experienced cardiologists. ““Due to low awareness among doctors, this condition is sometimes diagnosed and treated wrongly as a heart attack.
This is a waste of precious time, as the aneurysm can rupture anytime, killing the patient within three minutes,” he adds. Even as the surgeons were preparing themselves for a tedious surgery, a 50-year-old man from Erode was brought into the hospital, with the same problem — a ripped aorta.
“The surgeries were also tricky — there is a worldwide 15 to 30 per cent mortality associated with the procedure. The patients’ blood was cooled to 18 degrees and the ripped aorta was removed and replaced with a graft. The aortic valves had also been damaged and were replaced with artificial valves,” said Dr Bashi, adding that both patients recovered and were discharged nine days after the surgery.
Doctors at MIOT have operated on at least 100 patients with dissection of aneurysm, with a 98 per cent success rate, said Dr P.V.A Mohandas, chairman of MIOT Hospitals.
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