NEW DELHI: For 70-year-old Afghan national Firoza Sarwari, Indian doctors proved to be a God-send, who successfully removed a one-kg tumour from her chest in a complicated surgery. Sarwari was suffering from a rare form of tumour in the chest and had almost given up hope of returning to normal life. She had a swelling in the neck accompanied by difficulty in breathing and swallowing.
However, she was filled with new hope of being rid of her plight after being referred to Indian doctors. She was brought to Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in the national capital where the doctors successfully performed a highly complicated ‘retrosternal hemi thyroidectomy surgery’ to remove the tumour from her chest. Suresh Singh Naruka, an ENT consultant at the private hospital, led a team of doctors, who performed the complicated surgery with precision.
After evaluating her condition, the team of doctors concluded that she had developed a massive tumour in her chest, which could have formed due to the thyroid gland in her neck.“On imaging, the patient was found to have tumour in the chest that was compressing the wind-pipe and food-pipe and was also affecting her heart vessels. The tumour was lying very close to the heart vessels, thereby posing the danger of injury to the heart vessels at the time of surgery. Although the tumour originated from the thyroid gland, it spread to the chest area,” Bhabha Nanda Das, a cardio thoracic and vascular surgeon at the hospital, said.
He added, “This resulted in many other complications such as risk of loss of voice, permanent hole in the neck, damage to large vessels of the heart leading to torrential hemorrhage (excessive bleeding), which posed a high risk to the patient’s life and could have even led to her death.” Hence, the line of treatment which the doctors were supposed to adopt needed to be thorough and intricately precise in nature so that no other organs or blood vessels were damaged in the process of surgery.