Kenya: Surgeons Sew Up Hole in Baby's Heart
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The Nation (Nairobi)
27 August 2008
Posted to the web 28 August 2008
John Ngirachu
Nairobi
Looking at little Samara Ngugi in her cot in the children's ward at Karen Hospital, one would not tell that the lovely girl was suffering from one of the rarest heart conditions.
The 12-week-old quietly sucks on her pacifier and, like many children her age, closes her tiny hand around anything that comes into it. The other is heavily bandaged with an intravenous needle stuck into it.
A second pipe disappears into her nose but the little one appears fine until one notices that her hands and legs are too thin for her age and she is panting even as she sucks on the pacifier.
Flooding lungs
The first weeks of her life have perhaps been the worst for the little girl with the rare heart condition known in the medical world as Complete Artrioventricular Septal Defect.
This means that the part of her heart dividing the right and the left upper chambers is missing. There is also a single valve in the place where there should be two.
Worldwide, eight out of 1,000 children are born with congenital heart defects, with 15 per cent of them, one out of 1000, suffering from the condition.
"This results in the 'blue' (deoxygenated) blood from the body mixing with the 'red' (oxygenated) one from the lungs. Too much blood then gets to the lungs and ends up flooding them," explained Dr Hani Heinnen of the Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio.
Dr Heinnen is in Kenya as part of an eight-man team on the Heart-to-heart programme which caters for people with heart defects.
The team is currently at Karen Hospital where they are scheduled to carry out operations on nine patients this week.
Samara's successful four-hour surgery on Tuesday night involved taking part of the sac surrounding the heart and sewing it into the hole and making two valves out of the existing one.
On Wednesday, friends, family and staff at the hospital breathed a sigh of relief when she finally opened her eyes for the first time after leaving the operation theatre at around 9pm on Tuesday.
The increased blood in the lungs meant that Samara was using too much energy to breathe, sometimes breathing 50-60 times per minute, Dr Heinnen said.
The energy used meant that there was little left to assist the normal growth process and the baby now weighs 2.4 kilogrammes, less than half the normal weight for her age.
Up to last week, Samara was destined for Frontline Hospital in Chennai, India, where $10,000 (Sh660,000) was required for the operation alone. Much more would have gone into air fare and other expenses.
The journey begun at the Nairobi Hospital during a routine visit to a post-natal clinic when Samara was a month old.
"The doctor told us she had a heart murmur and advised us to take her for an echocardiogram," Samara's mother, Mrs Ann Ngugi, told the Nation on Tuesday, hours before the operation.
Initial tests were not clear but later ones confirmed Samara's rare condition. Several opinions and Sh400,000 later, Mr and Mrs Ngugi were advised to seek treatment for their daughter in India.
In the meantime, Samara had been admitted at Gertrude Garden Hospital thrice, suffering cold, pneumonia and fever. Friends and family had assisted the family to foot the bills.
At Mater Hospital, more than 25 patients are this week set to benefit from a programme that assists poor patients to meet the costs of open heart surgery.
Open-heart surgery costs at least Sh600,000 per patient and the series of week-long operations done by a team of 10 doctors from the United Kingdom will cost an estimated Sh15million.
Relevant Links
The money was raised from the Mater Heart run earlier this year with additional funding from Terres Des Homes, a Netherland-based organisation that partners with the hospital.
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