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Cardiac patient keeps chatting during ‘first-of-its-kind’ surgery

DUBAI — In probably the first-of-its-kind feat in the UAE and the Gulf region, 45-year-old Bangladeshi cardiac patient, Fareed, chatted with the doctors while they carried out a delicate heart surgery on him on Wednesday.

The coronary artery bypass surgery was done at the New Medical Centre (NMC) by a team of doctors led by NMC’s chief cardiac surgeon, Dr Girish Chandra Varma.

Fareed had suffered a heart attack on September 25.

‘This patient was unfit for general anaesthesia because he had COPD (Coronary Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), a serious lung disease, which makes it difficult for the patient to breathe,’ explained Dr Varma, while speaking to Khaleej Times yesterday.

He said the patient had been given some time to recover, hence the extended time frame in carrying out the operation.

He said the main requirement in such kind of surgery was the amount of anaesthesia to be administered.

‘However, once the basics were done, the surgery was carried out in two and a half hours. During this time, the patient was awake and chatting with the doctors,’ he said.

Dr Varma, who has carried out similar surgeries previously in India, said the patient was recovering well and would be discharged in a couple of days.

Dr Aruna Varma, chief cardiac anaesthetist at NMC, said the administering of anaesthesia was very tricky in this case. ‘We had to block the chest of the patient by giving an injection in the spinal cord, just below the neck through a small catheter,’ she explained.

She said that if the injection was administered higher, the patient could pass out and the operation would have to be carried out under general anaesthesia, and if the dose was administered a bit lower he could stop breathing.

‘So in this case, the level of the catheter being inserted needed to be just right,’ she said, adding that the important thing was balance in the amount of the anaesthesia and the location.