TIL Desk Lucknow/ Performing a challenging surgery at the department of pediatric surgery at Apollomedics Hospital Lucknow, the doctors have constructed entire food pipe of a 8 month-old boy who was born without it.
In a nearly six-hour-long operation, doctors used the stomach to construct the food pipe, which would grow with age. The boy (name) is a native of Nepal and was referred to the doctors at Apollomedics Lucknow just after birth.
The doctors explained that the patient faced breathing issues and turned blue as whatever milk was fed to him came out of the mouth or through the nose in the absence of a food pipe. In medical terms, this condition is termed “pure esophageal atresia”.
A team of experts led by Dr. Deepak Kandpal, senior consultant in paediatric surgery, performed a staged surgery. In the first stage, a tube was placed directly in the stomach to feed the child and another opening was made in the neck to drain the saliva.
“When (name)’s mother tried to feed him milk for the first time, he couldn’t gulp it. The initial investigation revealed that the baby was born without a food pipe. Ordinarily, food pipe-related diseases impact one in every 3,500 babies, but this case was even more critical as the entire length of the food pipe was absent, and hence the food pipe was made right from the neck till the stomach”, said the doctors.
The second operation on the baby is called gastric transposition, which was recently conducted in the hospital when the boy gained weight and turned eight months old.
In this operation, a food pipe was made by the doctors from the neck to the stomach. Now, the baby can feed through the mouth and is healthy. He has been discharged from the hospital.” The patient remained admitted to the hospital for twelve days post-surgery as he had to be observed in the ICU and even stayed on the ventilator. On the eighth day, coloured medicine was also given to the boy to check for any leakage in the food pipe constructed, and on the ninth day, he was fed food through the mouth for the first time, said Dr. Deepak Kandpal, senior consultant, paediatric surgery at Apollomedics Hospital Lucknow.
Dr. Mayank Somani, CEO and MD at Apollomedics Lucknow, said, “This is the second such critical case handled successfully by the doctors at Apollomedics Lucknow in less than a year’s time. Earlier, the doctors had treated a patient from Allahabad whose food pipe was also constructed through surgery.”
