Indian Hospital gives Karachi teenager a new life
20 June, 2005
CHENNAI, June 21 (Online): Pakistani teenager Karran Bari was born a blue baby but thanks to a team of Doctors of a Chennai based hospital she can now lead a normal life.
"The risk was high as this would be the third surgery on her heart but she has responded very well," said K.M. Cherian, at whose hospital the operation was performed, IANS reported.
In medical parlance, a blue baby is one born with a heart problem that prevents the blood from getting enough oxygen.
Thus, for 13 years, Karran, a beautiful and smiling class eight student at St. Paul's English High School in Karachi, has been unable to walk long distances, climb or run.
"Now I am fine," she told reporters here, a week after she was operated on.
On June 13, doctors performed a seven-hour complex open-heart correction for the pulmonary artery and the heart-lung connections. Leakage in one heart valve was stopped, another heart valve was replaced and a blood vessel on the left of the lung was widened.
"She has been an exceptionally brave girl," said Prem Sekar, one of the paediatric cardiologists taking care of Karran.
She will be closely monitored for the next six weeks and should be as healthy as any other 13-year-old in six months' time, doctors said Born to a Filipino mother and Pakistani father, Karran was first operated on in Bahrain in 1992, when she was just eight months old, her mother Zahra said.
A second surgery was performed, also in Bahrain, when she was three years old.
Earlier this year, when her heart trouble persisted, Karran was examined at Karachi's Aga Khan University Hospital, which advised surgery at a hospital in Bangalore.
The Bangalore hospital, however, expressed its inability to treat her particular condition. She was again taken to Bahrain, where doctors referred her to Chennai's Frontier Life Line Hospital. She is expected to return to Karachi early July.
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