In a major feat of its kind, the cardiac surgical team of city based Health City Hospital performed a rare and complicated heart surgeries successfully recently.

The patient, a senior Govt officer was suffering from a rare congenital heart condition known as coarctation of aorta or significant narrowing of the main blood pipe of the body. Due to this condition, the main blood pipe coming out of the heart which supplies blood to all parts of the body, became hugely dilated and thinned out and was on the verge of a tear. The aortic valve which is present at the outlet of the heart also became very leaky giving rise to a condition known as severe aortic regurgitation with decompensated chronic heart failure. When the patient presented to the hospital, he was totally breathless and moribund. He was immediately admitted in the ICU. His condition was evaluated with highly sophisticated 164 sliced CT angiography.

Finally he was taken for surgery after obtaining informed consent from him and his parents. His father a scholar and writer belonging to upper Assam area was very co-operative and helped us whole-heartedly in rendering appropriate treatment to his only son. Co-operation, understanding and trust between the doctor and the patient and more importantly patient’s relatives are essential for a successful treatment and its outcome.

During the surgery we had to remove the damaged valve and replaced it with an artificial valve along with replacement of the damaged blood pipe with an artificial synthetic woven pipe. This part of the operation is known as Bental’s procedure. But we also had to divert the blood coming out of the heart from the upper part of the main blood pipe to the lower part of the body with another artificial blood pipe by doing an ascending to  descending thoracic aortic bypass. The operation was very complicated  because of combination of these multiple complex procedures. During an operation on heart when the heart needs to be stopped, the function of the heart is taken over by a machine known as heart-lung machine & once the operation is over the machine is gradually turned off and the heart starts beating again. But during this operation we had to stop this machine also so that we have a good visual field for the surgery to be performed. Stopping this machine is very dangerous as the body circulation is totally stopped and the patient is virtually dead. If we stop the circulation for more than three minutes then irreversible damage to brain and other organs can occur. To circumvent this we brought down the core body temperature of the patient to 18 degree so that the circulatory stoppage time can be increased as by bringing down the temperature the basal metabolic rate of the body also can be brought down  and the circulatory stoppage time can be increased upto 15-20 minutes at 18 degree Celsius. After the main procedure the patient was again rewarmed and gradually the heart function also started.

The surgery was led by renowned heart surgeon Dr. Bhabananda Das and was ably assisted by Dr. Bikash Rai Das under whose care the patient was being treated. The other team members were Dr. Rabi Dey, cardiac anaesthetist, Mr. Alim, senior Physician’s Assistant, Mrs. Swapna, senior cardiac OT nurse cum nursing superintendent, Miss Reema, nursing in-charge of cardiac OT and others. The patient was also treated by Dr. Reshu & Dr. Rakhee, Critical Care consultants of our hospital.

The patient recovered uneventfully and was discharged from the hospital after ten days.

This has proved again that the cardiac surgical team of Health City Hospital is one of the best in the country and are capable of handling the most complicated surgeries with elan. This is certainly a good news to the people of North-East as they have now the most sophisticated hospital with the best team and their services at the doorstep in Guwahati.