A young heart...
Overcome by emotion, as Archana's grandmother holds his hands in her own, it is evident that not only the surgery but also this tiny gesture on the part of the heart surgeon has gone a long way to prove that OHF cares and cares deeply.
Care Unit (ICU) beds and 10 ward beds to the OHF," says Dr. Perumalpillai.
And so it was that last Sunday, Dr. Perumalpillai's quest saw fruition, with the first needy patient going under the scalpel. "We closed a large 2.4cm x 2.8cm hole in the heart of Archana," he explains.
Pointing out that though more and more such atrial septal defects (ASDs) can now be closed with a device sans an operation, he said that after close consultations with cardiologists it was decided that surgical closure was the better option in this case.
This decision was taken as a team, after Consultant Cardiologists Dr. Poopalan Lakshman and Dr. Mahesan Guruparan and Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist Dr. I.R. Ragunathan performed a transesophageal echocardiogram where Dr. Perumalpillai was also present, the Sunday Times learns.
"The threehour surgery involved placing Archana on cardiopulmonary bypass or the heartlung machine. Following the closure of the ASD, she was easily weaned off the machine and has made an uneventful recovery. She is expected to be discharged this weekend," said Dr. Perumalpillai.
Archana's is also not just a one-off openheart surgery. When the Sunday Times visited the NCH on Wednesday, preparations were underway for two more surgeries within the week - one on Thursday (July 10) and the other over this weekend.
Like Archana, but older is 35-year-old S. Nirmala from Kilinochchi. On Thursday she had open-heart surgery for the closure of a hole in the heart, while the third patient, a male, will undergo coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery over the weekend.
When the Sunday Times visited Archana to say goodbye to her before leaving for Colombo, she is all smiles, having been moved from the ICU to the ward. Soon it will be back to school for her with a clear idea of what she hopes to achieve in life. "I want to be a teacher," says Archana shyly.
A heart surgeon who was on the team which operated on her is also in her room, having brought her a small packet of jujubes that he had saved from his flight up to Jaffna.
Overcome by emotion, as Archana's grandmother holds his hands in her own, it is evident that not only the surgery but also this tiny gesture on the part of the heart surgeon has gone a long way to prove that OHF cares and cares deeply.
It is a gesture straight from the heart to the hapless heart patients of the area.
The surgical team which performed the open-heart surgery in Jaffna this week comprised Dr. Kumaradasan Gnanakanthan, Dr. Nagaratnam Sriskantharajah, Dr. Ravi Perumalpillai and Dr. Nihal Kulatilake.
The perfusion team consisted of Kamal Gunasekera and Pratheesh Maheswaran and the anaesthetic team Dr. Sundaralingam Premakrishna and Dr. Arulmoli Janaki and Nurses Ramachandran Neruka and Mayoori Theepan.
The theatre team included Nurses Vijeyabaskaran Vimalathevi and Ariot Sivasubramaniam and 'runners' Karunakaran Mary Powstina and Piraveena Sinnarasa, while the post-op care was by the ICU team, Niroja Puvanenthiran and Jegatha Sivakumar. The support staff included Vijaya Kumar, Jaya Theepan, Boniface Maria Jeyarose and Swenthini Jude.
The team from Oxford which facilitated the surgery consisted of Consultant Anaesthetist Dr. David Pigott, Specialist Registrar in Cardiothoracic Surgery, Dr. Sajiram Sarvananthan, Theatre Sister Angela Grantham, Anaesthetic Sister Louise Wilkins and ICU Sisters Shirley Janus and Wendy Allen.