Foetal medicine expert reflects on life-saving surgeries

AN ACCLAIMED Asian surgeon who featured in Channel 4’s Baby Surgeons: Delivering Miracles, has spoken of how he hopes the documentary will help change a “hugely judgmental culture” regarding women who make “difficult decisions about difficult pregnancies”.

Basky Thilaganathan is the director of foetal medicine at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, London, where he and his team perform intricate procedures on unborn babies while still in the womb.

Thilaganathan, and one of his colleagues, Professor Asma Khalil, highlight the role of foetal surgery in the womb in the Channel 4 programme.

“What really upsets me is when parents in really difficult situations are judged for what they’ve done,” the 55-year-old foetal medicine expert told The Times in an interview last week. “Women make tough choices. Sometimes they choose brave decisions and other times they say, ‘This is too much for us. We want to end the pregnancy’.”

Describing a case where a baby had tumour in his lungs, the docu-series shows how a 2mm needle was inserted across through mother’s skin, and through layers of adipose tissue, muscles, and the chest wall of the baby, heading for the 1mm blood vessel that was feeding the tumour.

Thilaganathan’s task was to “zap” the blood vessel without interfering with the heart, which was just 1 cm away.

He described how decades of advances in medical science, including lasers and ultrasound, have made these surgeries possible compared to 30 years ago when it would have involved opening up the uterus, pulling out the baby, cutting open her chest, removing the tumour, putting her back in and sewing up the uterus.

Thilaganathan, who is of Sri Lankan heritage, grew up in Nigeria, where his father worked as a civil engineer. At 11, he was sent to boarding school in England, at

Dulwich College. He lives in south east London with his wife and two daughters. He was part of a team that performed the first surgery to correct twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a rare complication when identical twins share a placenta. “It took a couple of hours,” Thilaganathan said. “Everyone was sweating... Nowadays, we do it at 8 am, it takes 10 minutes and I do a full day’s work afterwards.”

He told the newspaper, “we’re not surgeons. We’re foetal medicine experts.”