1-yr-old Tanzanian boy gets new lease of life after surgery at city hospital

A one-year-old Tanzanian boy got a new lease of life after he was operated at a city hospital for a rare congenital heart disease, doctors said today.

Fravianous had no right lung and no blood vessel going to it. He only had a left lung and the left pulmonary artery arising from the aorta -- a condition called hemitruncus ('half-truncus'), they said.

A normal heart has four chambers and four valves, where one blood vessel carries blood to the body and the other one to the lungs.

"The patient also had a big hole in the heart," a doctor said.

A team of doctors at the Indraprashtha Apollo Hospital here recently operated on him for nearly 6-7 hours to treat him, a hospital spokesperson said.

"They successfully performed the highly-complicated and critical surgery to save the life of the Tanzanian baby boy," she said.

Muthu Jothi, Senior Consultant-Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery Department, who was part of the team which operated on him, said, "When we first saw the patient we knew that this will be a high-risk surgery, but we decided to go ahead and operate as the child would not survive without the surgery."
Dativa, the mother of the boy, said, "My son too got a new lease
of life from a serious disease."