Life saving ops for dad and his baby daughter ..35 years apart
A BABY has had life-saving surgery 35 years after her dad was operated on for the same rare condition.
Robyn and Richard Franklin were both born without part of their oesophagus – the pipe that links the mouth to the stomach.
The condition, which affects around one in 5,000 babies, means they cannot swallow and could die without surgical intervention.
Richard and wife Hannah discovered their daughter had inherited the condition from her dad just hours after she was born.
A few days later she had an operation to join the oesophagus to her windpipe at Birmingham Children’s Hospital – the same hospital where her dad had his procedure.
But both were very different. For Richard, who is a bus driver from Birmingham, surgeons had to open up his chest by cutting between the ribs. It meant he was left with a large scar across his torso.
He also needed regular dilatations, where a balloon is put in the oesophagus under general anaesthetic and inflated to stretch the scar tissue.
Richard, whose twin brother also had the same surgery, said: “We needed numerous dilations growing up as well as additional surgeries.
“We were told at the time not only how rare this condition was but how rare it was for myself and my twin brother to survive.”
For baby Robyn, surgeons used a pioneering new technique with stateof-the-art equipment. During the keyhole surgery, doctors rebuilt her oesophagus by operating in a space around the size of a matchbox between the heart and lungs, using tiny instruments just 3mm in size.
The method means patients usually recover faster, feed quicker and are not left with major scarring.
Robyn was able to feed by mouth just 12 days later.
Her operation, which lasted six hours in November, required a team of surgeons, anaesthetists and theatre practitioners as well as support from the neonatal unit, intensive care and nurses on the neonatal surgical wards.
Over the 12 days Robyn spent in hospital, 50 health professionals were directly involved in her care.
Suren Arul, the consultant paediatric surgeon who treated Robyn with surgeon Giampiero Soccorso, said: “We only see around two or three case each year. To know Robyn can grow up normally having had major surgery but with no scars is a wonderful thing.”