But for the availability of an Extracorporeal membrane oxygenator (ECMO) in the city, 17-year-old Sai Vivek would have been yet another statistic—brain dead person whose organs could be used for transplantation.
The ECMO in the Heart and Brain Institute is the only one in Andhra Pradesh. The ECMO is very similar to the heart-lung bypass machine used for open heart surgery. Extracorporeal means “outside the body” and a membrane ‘oxygenator’ is an equipment which delivers oxygen into the blood.
It is a second life for Vivek who had a motorbike accident at Vakkalagadda village near Challapalli, around 60 km from here, on May 4. He was rushed to the city and admitted to a corporate hospital. Both his lungs were badly damaged and he even had injuries on the head.
Though he was put on a ventilator the oxygen concentration in the blood dropped to 39 per cent and would have fallen even further causing brain death.
It was at that moment that the boy’s father Uppala Prasada Rao, an award winning organic farmer, came to know about the ECMO at the Heart and Brain Institute (Andhra Hospitals group).
Andhra Hospital CMD P. Ramana Murthy said that the boy was on the ECMO for four days and on the fifth day he was transferred to a ventilator. Cardio Thoracic surgeon Dileep Kumar said the boy went into cardiac arrest three or four times because of the low oxygen concentration in the blood. Blood thinners were a danger because there was a chance that they would cause bleeding in the head, but they had to be given to prevent blood from clotting in the ECMO machine. Other complications the developed were managed. The team of doctors trained to operate the machine was as important as the machine itself, Dr Dileep said.
Andhra Hospitals director P.V. Rama Rao, who worked in UK for nearly a decade, said that there were only six ECMOs in that country.
