A rare featChennai: It was nothing short of a miracle for Lavanya and Balaji that impelled them to rush their two-month old baby Shriya to Malar Hospitals in Chennai on the fateful day of April 13 this year.
For, when they brought her to the Fortis Healthcare associate hospital around 8 am that day, Shriya was hardly breathing and had no arm or leg pulses. Her acid levels in the blood (the pH level, as it is called) were enormously high.
Diagnoising a mitral valve leak (a leak in the left side valve of the heart) in Shriya, Dr K R Balakrishnan, the renowned cardiac surgeon at the hospital, decided to immediately perform one of the rarest valve repair operations on her.
The team of Dr G Prabhakaran, paediatrician and neo-natologist; Dr K G Suresh Rao, cardiac anaesthesiologist and Dr R Ravikumar, cardiologist and interventionist, along with Dr Balakrishnan performed a three-hour-long delicate surgery to arrest the blood leakage.
Text: K. SreedeviImage: The two-month-old Lavanya who underwent a heart surgery on April 13, 2009.
Heart valves implanted sans surgery
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