By IANS
Toronto : Canadian doctors have performed a ‘miracle in medical sciences’ as they conducted a marathon surgery on a woman to repair her ruptured aorta as well as deliver her baby by caesarean section at a hospital in the city of Edmonton.
Canadian TV (CTV) said the baby was delivered by caesarean by Billy Wong while other surgeons got ready to repair 36-year-old Roxanne Follett’s torn aorta. The heart vessel had ruptured 35 weeks into her pregnancy.
“They could make an episode of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ or ‘ER’ based on this because it is one of those rare cases we will probably never deal with again,” Wong was quoted as saying.
The miraculous surgery was performed Jan 24, but was made public now.
The caesarean operation to deliver the baby lasted an hour while the emergency surgery to save the mother lasted eight hours.
“The entire operation was both extremely rare and dangerous,” said Roderick MacArthur, one of the surgeons.
About 40 such surgeries have been performed worldwide during the past 25 years, but it was the first in Canada. Out of these 40 cases, the mother and baby have both survived only in 18 times, the channel said.
“So they were in a very high-risk situation. They’ve been very fortunate that both of them have done very well,” MacArthur said.
He said they had to perform the difficult job of cooling the woman’s body temperature and draining her blood with a heart-lung machine soon after the caesarean section.
“We drain all the blood from the body, fix the aneurysm and fill the body back up with blood and come off the heart-lung machine. It’s almost certain that the baby would not survive that operation,” he said.
Wong added: “We were quite concerned that Roxanne would be at really high risk and not make it through surgery.”
However, her husband, Douglas Follett, gave the go-ahead to the worried surgeons.
The baby girl is being kept under observation at the hospital and Roxanne is said to recovering well.
She has named her daughter Miracle. “I want everyone to know that she’s my miracle baby,” she said.