Six heart attacks, 12-hour operation, 'Miracle baby' survives all

Vidisha, a four-month-old baby, is being termed as a 'miracle baby' by those who know her story. The girl who has been in hospital for the last couple of months as she suffered six heart attacks after undergoing a 12-hour surgery for a major heart defect is finally ready to go home.

Ready to be discharged in a couple of days, her fight has not only been against her medical condition but also financial. But the baby seems to have fought off all challenges thrown at her.

Her parents who could barely manage Rs 25,000 for the Rs 5-lakh bill, saw donors of the hospital step-up and clear the dues.

Born to Vishaka and Vinod Waghmare, residents of Kalyan, Mumbai, she suffered with a heart defect called transposition of the great arteries, in which connections to the big arteries called aorta and pulmonary artery are switched.

"When she was 45 days old, Vidisha vomited after I fed her and fell unconscious. We shook her awake, but she again became unconscious," said Vishaka, the girl's mother. They rushed the baby to a local nursing home, but were advised to take her to B J Wadia Hospital.

"Basically, her heart's anatomy was opposite of a normal heart," said Dr Biswa Panda, paediatric cardiac surgeon at the hospital where she was operated on and is being treated.

But as the surgery was able to improve her heart function, her weak lungs did not. Dr Panda said that surgeries for the correction for the transportation of the great arteries should be done immediately after birth, otherwise like in Vidisha's case the poorly formed lungs get used to a certain pattern and are unable to to adjust to the sudden correction of the heart.

This led to the oxygen concentration in her blood to routinely drop to a third of the normal level while carbon dioxide would increase upto three times.

She spent 51 days in the ICU after the surgery and suffered cardiac arrest six times due to this imbalance and once needed her heart to resuscitated for 15 minutes, according to the doctor. The hospital used a high-frequency oscillatory ventilator for her lungs to stabilize. And now after such a long fight she is finally stable and can leave the hospital.

Dr Minnie Bodhanwala, CEO of B J Wadia Hospital, said, "We toiled for three years to get a cardiac surgery department to help underprivileged children with heart disease. It feels good that our objective is being met."

OneIndia News