Written By: Debjani Arora | Updated : April 10, 2015, 12:59 AM
There are times and incidences in medical science when the wired and the bizarre transform into a normal affair and that is when we call it a 'miracle.' Here are few cases that posed to be like a challenge to medical science with little hope and lots of disparities. However, the stories turned out to be different than what was predicted. These medical miracle stories will make you believe that miracles do happen, and for the better.
Heart surgery before birth
Heart surgeries are risky and increase the probability of mortality, even in healthy adults. But if a heart condition is developed before birth, what could be the consequences for the baby. One might say that the innocent soul might have to live with a defective heart for life. However, doctors from the Hyderabad Care Hospital proved this fact wrong.
A 25-year-old pregnant woman who went for a scheduled sonography during her second trimester received unpleasant news about her baby s development. It was learnt that her baby was diagnosed with severe aortic valve obstruction that was causing failure of blood supply, due to interrupted pumping of the left ventricle. This was causing further damage in the form of leakage of mitral valve and shrinkage of the left side of the heart chambers. This condition could lead to infant death if the baby were to be born with the damaged heart. An abortion at this stage was out of question.
In a one-of-its-kind case, the doctors in Hyderabad performed India s first fetal heart surgery to save the baby from being born with a heart defect. As scary as it sounds, it came with its own set of complications. A team of 30 doctors operated the mother during her 27th week of pregnancy using special needles and specific sized balloons. However, this wasn t the first time the mother was wheeled into the OT. In fact, the doctors had failed to resurrect the baby s heart in their first attempt during the 26th week due to unfavourable fetal position. But they got lucky during the succeeding week. With an appropriate wire and balloon, the aortic valve was dilated to relieve the blockage. About 60 percent of blockage was cleared with the balloon dilatation. The doctors believe this would help the baby grow and develop normally till labour strikes in. Now, all we can wish is a normal and cheerful life for the baby who went under the knife, while in the womb.
Wood penetrates man s head
Imagine the plight of a man who has a piece of wood jutting out of his skull after an accident. And guess what? He walks into the hospital with a heavy head bleeding, with as much ease as men who brought him in. This incident happened two years ago to a 22-year-old carpenter who was working at a construction site. While separating some bamboo sticks, a big piece of wood fell to his head piercing through his brain compressing the grey matter. And this could have turned to be fatal. But it turned out, the man lives to tell his tale today after a miraculous save.
After the accident, the man was taken to KEM hospital, Mumbai, where he was operated on. If this incident would have not killed him, it could have increased the risk of paralysis, expose him to infections or lead to other major organ failure. However, this man suffered no such ordeal. After the surgery was performed, he was kept under constant observation; he left the hospital in good health.
A knife in the jaw
This happens only in China or so should we say. A middle-aged man had a blade sitting in his jaw for years and didn t even know about it. He often complained of frequent headaches and problems in swallowing food. However, he never seemed to be aware of any problem. It was only when a CT scan was performed to assess the nature of the headache; it revealed that a blade was struck on his jaw which was the reason for the pain. The astonishing part was that, there was no sign of physical assault or any obvious explanation as to how the blade got lodged into his jaws. He was lucky that the blade didn t cut through his brain arteries or damage his facial nerves. In fact, he suffered occasional bleeding from mouth and took painkiller injections to combat jaw pain, almost for a decade. It took a medical procedure by a trained stomatologist to remove the rusted blade and provide him lifelong relief.
A different kind of heart
Our school textbooks told us that the heart has four chambers. How about 5 chambers in the heart? Doctors too gazed at this medical miracle with awe. It was recently reported that a man had lived for 42 years of his life with a defective heart and is considered a living miracle by medical professionals. However, this is a rare congenital disease, which has resulted in breathlessness, continuous coughing and chest pain in the victim. This condition wasn t harmless and had life-threatening consequences looming over his head. But luck was by his side for over four decades. A team of cardiologists operated on him recently to give him a new lease of life. The surgery was rare and a complicated one, where doctors had to operate meticulously on the heart for hours to restore normalcy. He is now healthy and hearty to tell his tale.
Miracle mother
Losing your pulse for 45 minutes in the operation theatre, amidst a caesarean section, and thereafter delivering a healthy baby and tending to it is nothing short of a miracle. No, this isn t a scene from a Bollywood movie, but a true case of a woman from Florida who became unconscious in the OT during the procedure. A team of doctors, at the hospital she was admitted, tried to revive her when she collapsed following a rare amniotic fluid embolism. Just after she gave birth, the amniotic fluid entered her blood stream disrupting circulation. It could have taken an adverse turn if it led to brain damage. As she showed no signs of revival the doctors decided to pronounce her dead after several attempts. However, she revived on her own without any further medical assistance to smile at her newborn baby. If this isn t a miracle, we wouldn t know one that would be.
United in the womb
It is a bliss (or may be not) to deliver twins. However, with conjoined twins, the joy of birth is always layered with anxiety, disappointment and apprehensions over the children s future. Though not all conjoined twins are able to lead normal lives, but we should thank the advances in medical sciences that have made life a bit easy for conjoined twins. In a recently reported case where conjoined twin girls were born to a middle-class mother, they were separated successfully by a team of 40 doctors lead by liver surgeon A. S. Soin at Medanta Medicity. This makes it believe that where nature thumps the scalpel triumphs, at least in terms of medical science.
Saboora and Safoora were born with 'Omphalopagus,' a disorder in which twins are born joined at the abdomen and shared a liver. Such cases are the rarest of the rare and occur one in 100,000 births, with three out of four cases being girls. What makes it scary is the fact that, the success rate of such operations is very low and calls for a complicated medical procedure. The minutest of errors can lead to devastating consequences. Apart from the liver, it was important to rule out possible communications of the two hearts and their coverings; the covering of the lung, and the intestines, as that would have made the separation procedure even more complicated. The twin sisters, before undergoing an hour long surgery, had to undergo four different body scans - a triphasic CT scan, a nuclear isotope hepatobiliary scan, a high resolution chest CT scan and also a separate dye study of their intestines. But all s well that ends well, and the good news is that the twins are safe as the surgery was a success.
Image source: Getty Images
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