Surgeons are just like sportsmen: much like a ‘batting’ or ‘bowling’ hand, doctors also have a particular hand that they operate with. For the peculiar case of a 14-year-old boy, whose heart had been pushed into the extreme left portion of his chest, surgeons had to adopt a ‘left handed’ approach to sew up the hole in his heart and plug an aortic leak.
Luckily for Randir*, who is an eighth grader from Mumbai, veteran cardiac surgeon at MIOT Hospitals Dr VV Bashi was born ambidexterous. “My parents forced me to use my right hand though I was more comfortable with my left, when I was young,” he recalls. The surgeon was skilled enough to complete the complex surgery, despite the change of sides.
Though the hole in his heart (ASD) was diagnosed a decade ago by doctors in Mumbai, they felt that it could wait till he was older.When doctors took a look at his heart again ahead of the corrective surgery in May, they found a bigger problem. “He had a massive aortic anuerysm. It was dilated to almost 6.7 cm which could have ruptured at any time,” says Dr Bashi, who describes the situation as a ticking bomb - if it ruptured, he would have been dead in three minutes flat. “He needed corrective surgeries to fix both faults, simultaneously, while his heart was off centre,” summed up the surgeon. The reason that Randir’s heart was so far away from the centre of the chest was a congenital genetic defect called Noonan’s syndrome, “The cleft in his sternum caused the shift in his heart’s position, to such an extent that his left lung was partially crushed since birth,” added the doctor. If this shift hadn’t been there, doctors could have easily cut the centre line of his rib cage and corrected the defects in his heart. “We had to make two holes through his third and fifth rib spaces to do the operation,” he adds. Once in, the team of surgeons worked for five hours to ensure that both faults were fixed without damage to his organs. “Thankfully, we didn’t make any mistakes and managed to restart his heart,” says Dr Bashi, whose relief at having the boy alive and well was apparent. Today, save for a mask to keep infections at bay, Randir is an ‘as-normal-as-can-be’ boy, barely weeks post-surgery. The only risk for him is that the sternum doesn’t grow further inward as he grows older and cramp his other organs for space.
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