In a rare surgery, two-year-old girl with no bladder gets a new one

In a rare surgery, doctors from Jehangir Hospital in Pune successfully created a new bladder on a two-year-old girl from Yemen. She was born with a unique birth defect wherein she had no urinary bladder and had only one kidney. A large portion of the abdominal wall was absent too. She had urine dribbling onto her thighs and legs and had no control over her stools.

Baby Fatima had an unsuccessful urinary bladder reconstruction operation by doctors in Yemen after which she developed repeated urinary tract infections, further compromising the one kidney that she had. Her parents then approached doctors at Jehangir hospital and she was operated three weeks ago. A newbladder was created by doctors by making a pouch using a portion of intestines. She is fine now and will be discharged on Friday.

Paediatric surgeon Dasmit Singh who successfully operated on Fatima said that a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan done to see why she was not able to control passing of her stool also revealed that her spinal cord and nerves were adhering to the surrounding tissues resulting in an undue stretching of the cord (tethered cord syndrome) causing damage to the spinal nerves. The nerves were encased in a fatty tumour (intra-spinal lipoma) and had to be treated urgently.

Also Read

More News

Singh explained that the surgery entailed operating from the back, cutting open the bones of the spine (laminectomy) and releasing all attachments of the spinal cord. Neurosurgeon Prashant Khandelwal assisted Dr Singh during this surgery. During the second surgery Singh, assisted by paediatric surgeon Kshama Kulkarni and a team of anaesthetists including Sudhir Phadke, and Mohan Swami, made a pouch within the body from a portion of the intestines to collect urine (neobladder) and a pipeline was also constructed to drain the urine from her single kidney.

Singh added that the child is completely fine now and will be able to perform the task of removing the urine through the catheter herself as she grows older, making her life as near normal as possible.

The hospital gets a large number of patients from Yemen, Oman, Iraq, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria for treatment of various complicated conditions due to the high success rate and good outcomes of complex surgeries carried out here, revealed George Eapen, CEO, Jehangir hospital.