Coimbatore: A 62-year-old Iraqi soldier, who lost both his legs in the Gulf war, has successfully undergone a coronary artery bypass surgery in a city hospital earlier this week. Jummah Jabr, who had been suffering from severe coronary artery triple vessel disease, said many hospitals in the Middle East had refused perform surgery on him as he did not have legs from which veins are usually harvested for the procedure.
It all started with recurrent chest pain around three months ago. The soldier was subsequently diagnosed with coronary artery triple vessel disease. Since the disease was severe, doctors in Iraq told him that angioplasty and stenting was not possible. “The standard procedure for bypass in such a case is harvesting of one mammary artery behind the breast bone and veins from lower limbs, usually below the knee. Since he did not have legs from which veins were to be harvested, doctors said the surgery could not be done,” said a statement from the city-based Sri Ramakrishna Hospitals, where the surgery was performed.
Jabr approached the medical tourism department in Iraq to see if he could approach any hospital abroad. It was with a strong ray of hope that Jabr and his family got in touch with the Ramakrishna Hospital in the city. Doctors realized that they could use the internal mammary artery, along with the left radial artery, taken from the patient’s right forearm to perform the triple vessel bypass. “Called total arterial revascularization, this method of surgery is not performed usually in many cardiac centres,” said the hospital’s chief cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr S Thiagarajamurthy. The surgery took three hours.
Fortunately, there was a younger patient in the hospital who had undergone the same procedure a few days earlier.
“That patient met Jabr, showed him scar and explained the recovery process. Seeing the other patient recovering so well, Jabr and his family too gained more confidence,” Dr Thiagarajamurthy said.
The hospital said total arterial revascularization was usually performed in patients aged below 50 who must undergo bypass. “This procedure, which works well for more than 20 years, is done only on 15% of patients even in countries like the USA and UK,” Dr Thiagarajamurthy said.
