The Hindu : Front Page : Kala lives to fight another day

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Aug 19, 2005

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Kala lives to fight another day

Ramya Kannan

LIFE-SAVING SURGERY: V.V. Bashi, explaining the successful complex heart surgery on 24-year-old girl (extreme left) at MIOT Hospitals in Chennai on Thursday.

CHENNAI: Perhaps, Kala did not cry when she was born. May be the duct that connects arteries and veins carrying pure and impure blood from the heart in foetuses and closes the moment the newborn utters a cry, failed to seal in her case.

Kala suffered from ventricular septal defect — an opening between two chambers of the heart — and her pulmonary artery was swollen several times its original size. As if this were not enough, the pressure in her lungs was very high, an abnormal 120 mm.

Yet Kala lived for 24 years and lives today. Which is probably why V.V. Bashi, MIOT Hospital's cardiologist who performed a life-saving operation on her, thinks she lives a charmed life.

"It is a miracle she has lived for 24 years. Lung pressure had been building up slowly and soon she would have become inoperable," Dr. Bashi told mediapersons on Thursday. Her quality of life, though, had deteriorated rapidly, especially in the last five years. Her parents, who live in Thoraipakkam, approached many hospitals, but nobody was willing to operate upon Kala.

"She was a high-risk case. Finding no record of all these three complications occurring together in any patient, we were forced to innovate," Dr. Bashi explained. "So many things could have gone wrong during the operation, but they did not," he said. Dr. Bashi and his team comprising Dr. K. Srinivasa Babu, Dr. Aju Jacob, nurses and other technical staff laboured four hours to patch up Kala's heart just the way it should be. Kala is a bookbinder who makes about Rs. 1,800 a month. Her father Subramani is a coolie. The operation cost came to Rs. 2,50,000, of which the family was able to raise a little over Rs. 1 lakh. "We had petitioned the Chief Minister, but have not yet received any reply. Therefore, we had to take loans at high rates of interest," Kala's mother Manimala said.

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