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| THI organises live open heart surgery |
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Sunday, November 22, 2009
By our correspondent
Karachi
Tabba Heart Institute (THI) organised a “Live Open Heart Surgery Conference” at its auditorium on Saturday. Renowned cardiothoracic surgeons Dr Khalid Rasheed, chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at THI, and Dr Ghufranullah Khan performed two cases of open heart bypass and valve replacement surgeries, which were telecast live from the operation theatre for the audience.
The audience included cardiac surgeons and physicians as well as students, postgraduate trainees and professors. During the time when Dr Khalid was performing cardiac surgery, Dr Ghufranullah kept everyone amused with his sense of humour, which came in handy as it kept most of the people glued to their seats.
At one instance a lady asked who’s heart was being operated, and Dr Ghufranullah said it’s a male heart and added lightly “can’t you see the way it’s banging?” On serious note the doctor said that the female heart happens to be the most difficult one to do surgery, as they have high mortality rate in surgeries and majority of the females have short necks so that makes it all the more difficult to work on and a wide incision could not be made.
Answering a query during the question-answer session, Dr Ghufranullah said that having a heart attack at the age of 40 was your own fault rather than nature’s, “as we decide what we eat and when we eat it, so if you take care of your diet and walk daily for 15 minutes, there’s no way that you can get any disease let alone heart problem.”
One student asked what if a patient was aware during the heart surgery, to which the doctor replied that it happens very rarely. Explaining bypass surgery, Dr Ghufranullah said that arteries which supply blood to the heart develop a fat on it because of which the blood supply gets reduced and the arteries get choked so in order to pass blood from these obstructions a bypass surgery was conducted.
After performing the surgery Dr Khalid Rasheed spoke to the audience waiting for him at the auditorium. Speaking about the heart transplant surgery and its inception in Pakistan, Dr Khalid said, “It is the simplest of all surgeries and requires a set of pre-transplant tests in which we make sure whether the body will accept the heart or not”. For this purpose blood tests were matched and medicines were given to the patients to suppress the body’s reaction to the new heart, he added.
Dr Khalid said that heart transplant surgery has gained acceptance all over the world and it’s just a matter of promoting awareness since there exists a lot of preconceived notions attached to it and most importantly getting it legalized through the organ donation bill. “Jamia al Azhar Institute in Egypt has accepted and allowed transplantations and also proved it to be Islamic so no one should have any doubts about it,” he said, adding, “Many people don’t want to donate organs as they feel an emotional attachment to their loved ones and we respect that, but they need to feel about the life and happiness it will provide to another person.”
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ISSN 1563-9479 
