A rare heart surgery and procedure was performed on an eight-month-old child by cardiac surgeons a city hospital here. The baby,weighing only four kgs had a large hole between the upper chambers of the heart and the surgery was done last week by a team of cardiologists at the Care Hospital,a release said. The left atrium was divided into two parts by a thin membrane. This resulted in three chambers in the upper half of the heart. The normal heart would be having only two chamber separated by a spectum with out any hole between them so that impure blood collected in the right upper chamber do not mix with the pure blood in the left chamber. This defect is called Cor Triatriatum in medical parlance which consists of an additional membrane in the left Atrium following which the veins returning blood from the lungs now actually comes into the right side of the heart. From this chamber blood goes to left ventricle through small holes in the membrane. As a result of this condition,the impure blood was getting mixed up in all the chambers and there was back pressure in the lungs and child was getting heart failure as well as not putting on weight,it said. This condition was corrected by the pediatric cardiac surgeon Dr Jagannath by removing the membrane and closing the hole in such a way that the blood from the lungs went to the left ventricle and the blood from the body went to the right. The child had a complete heart block which persisted despite waiting for 15 days. The child needed to have a pacemaker inserted. The problem is the size of the lead as well as the pacemaker. Generally the leads are implanted directly onto to the surface of the heart but doctors studied the case and decided to place the leads via the vein from the left arm and into the heart directly to enhance the life the pacemaker and the lead would be well protected. But as the child was too small and too weak and there was no space to place the device on the left side of the chest,the release said. Therefore the lead was tunneled through the chest wall into the abdomen ad the pulse generator was placed there. Only 300 such cases are reported till date all over the world and this is the first such case in India,claim the hospitals in the press release.
