Prime Minister conscious and stable

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was conscious and “very-very stable”, doctors said today at the end of a successful coronary by-pass surgery, a complex beating-heart operation that took nearly 14 hours. As many as five by-passes were conducted.

“The surgery was successful,” said Deepak Sandhu, the spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office.

For the next 48 hours, only the family members will be allowed to meet the 76-year-old Singh. He will be at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), where the operation was performed, for seven to eight days.

In two weeks, the Prime Minister will be able to attend some official work, most of his duties in four weeks, and all of them in six weeks.

Singh was shifted to Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of AIIMS after the surgery in operation theatre No 5, where he will be under observation for 48 hours.

The prime minister underwent five bypassses, in which older grafts in his heart were replaced to develop an alternative blood supply route, sidelining the blocked part, with graft of arteries and vessels derived from other parts of the body.

A team of 11 doctors of AIIMS and Mumbai-based Asian Heart Institute (AHI) operated on the Prime Minister. The team was led by Rama Kant Panda, who has performed more than 700 “re-do” bypass surgeries. Currently the vice-chairman and cardio vascular thoracic surgeon at AHI, he studied at AIIMS.

Singh’s operation, too, was a “re-do” category surgery. From AIIMS, Milind Hote and S K Chaudhry, associate professors and cardio-thoracic surgeons, took part in the operation.

“Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was brought into the operation theatre at 5:30 am. The operation finally began at 8:45 am,” Sudhir Vaishnav, cardio-vascular thoracic surgeon with AHI, told reporters. The operation ended at about 7.30 pm. Around 3.10 pm, the first graft was successfully performed.

“Everything has gone off well,” External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said later.

Panda was specially picked for the surgery. “These are sophisticated surgeries and need a high level of expertise,” Vaishnav said.

The technical staff was drawn from different departments of AIIMS. Apart from Panda and Pradyot Kumar Rath — Rath, like Panda, is a cardio-vascular thoracic surgeon at AHI — Vijay Desilva (ICU specialist) and Narendra Garach (cardiac anaesthetist) were also involved.

The hospital campus was guarded heavily by armed security personnel. For the cardio vascular thoracic surgery unit, special identity cards were issued. Some relatives of the patients in the waiting rooms adjacent to this unit had to come out as the room was overcrowded. But the Special Protection Group officers asked all of them to return.