You can trust the doc to sometimes do even the impossible. Doctors at Fortis Hospital in the city, have successfully repaired a hole in the heart of a one-year-old-girl from Nigeria, whose religious belief forbids her from accepting a blood transfusion or blood products.
Baby Florence from Nigeria was suffering from a congenital heart defect called Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD), which meant she had to undergo immediate correction with an open heart surgery. “We had to accept the fact that if the child suffered bleeding, we would simply have to sit back and watch her bleed to death,” explained Dr Joseph Xavier, Consultant Paediatric Cardiac Surgeon, Fortis Hospitals who performed the major open heart surgery.
“Open heart surgery normally involves the use of a heart lung machine which reduces the haemoglobin content to so low levels that various organs could even be damaged due to oxygen deficiency. In normal circumstances, blood would be pumped into the heart lung machine to correct this problem. But this could not be done in Florence’s case as the child is a Jehovah’s Witness and will not accept any blood. So we had to use other methods to overcome this problem,” added the doctor.
He said that in children, such surgery is even more difficult.