Rare surgery saves Gulf returnee

CHENNAI: When Vellakannu left Riyadh in February this year, he not only brought home the fruit of seven years of manual labour, but also unwittingly bore within him an infection from the animals he was in contact with in the Middle East. Little did he know that the mild fever that he had been experiencing then was caused by a bacterium called Brucella, which caused an extremely rare and near-fatal condition called Brucellosis. “I returned to my native town of Kallakurichi, after they told me that it was the environment there (Middle East) that was causing my illness,” he said.Sadly, the change of climate did little to prevent his condition from worsening.Brucellosis is a disease that is not native to humans, explained a veterinary doctor.  While it is native to livestock like sheep, cows and camels, it can also affect dogs.After nearly nine months of treatment at a local Puducherry Hospital, his condition deteriorated and on November 4, he was in a moribund state. There was a large vegetation clogging his heart valves.“The infection had become so acute that he had regurgitations in his aortic, mitral and tricuspid valves,” explained Dr Harshavardana Reddy, Senior Cardiac Surgeon at SRM Medical College and Hospital. He underwent a seven-hour surgery,  at SRM Hospital, where a team of cardiac surgeons replaced the damaged aortic valve with a prosthetic one, besides correcting the anomalies in the other two valves. He was taken off the heart-lung machine and only by about 7 am, Vellakannu  was declared stable. I am thankful to be alive,” he said.