While commending the team that performed the surgery, the CMD said what made the operation unique was the method applied which, he said, was different from those being used abroad.

“Generally, if an open heart surgery is to be done, the cardiologist will stop the heart and divert the blood into the machine to do the work. That’s the way it’s done abroad.

“But here, the surgeons did not stop the heart and neither did they divert the blood to a machine. Rather, the operation was done directly” he said.

The leader of the team, Dr Uvie Onakpoya, said the boy suffering from heart problem was referred to OAUTHC from Wesley Guild Hospital, Ilesa, for further diagnosis and treatment.

Onakpoya, a heart surgeon, said the patient’s heart was not working well as at the time he was admitted at the hospital, adding that he was immediately referred to the pediatric cardiologists for prompt attention.

“The pediatric cardiologists did an echocardiography on the boy which showed that there was problem with his heart. 

“The problem with his heart was a very rare one, and I can say that nobody has ever carried out this kind of operation in Nigeria and West African subregion before,” he said.

Onakpoya said the aneurysm of the boy was bigger than the size of the left artery of a normal child, adding that this had compressed the left lower chamber of the heart, thus resulting in the heart failure.

He said the CT scan, which was done on the boy, further confirmed that his aneurysm had grown bigger, meaning that something urgent needed to be done before it got ruptured, the implication of which, he said, was death. The cardiologist attributed cases of individuals collapsing, slumping and dying suddenly to aneurysm bursting.

Also speaking, a former Head, Department of Anesthetic, OAUTHC, Dr Anthony Adenekan, said the heart operation was the first of its kind, describing the boy’s condition as lifethreatening which required urgent attention.

source: Medicalworldnigeria