Apollo Hospitals launched its first standalone centre for fertility treatment. The centre in Anna Nagar will include not just gynaecological services but also cryo-storage facility, an embroyology lab and an andrology clinic for male fertility issues, said Preetha Reddy, executive vice-chairperson of Apollo Hospitals Enterprises, who inaugurated the facility on Thursday.
The centre would be the flagship facility in the city and the rest of the State, carrying forward Apollo’s ‘Cradle’ brand. In the coming months, the hospital plans to open up a couple of more such centres in the city and one in Madurai.
Conference tomorrow
The Tamil Nadu Electrophysiology Council, an association of electrophysiologists in the State, is organising its second annual meeting and an international conference, ‘Tamil Nadu Electrophysiological International Conference’ on May 28 and 29, in association with the Chennai chapter of the Cardiology Society of India. The conference aims at formulating guidelines on electrophysiology, the science of diagnosis and treatment of heart rhythm disorders. The meeting and conference will have presentations by specialists
A unique surgery
On Tuesday, in a five-hour surgery at the department of arthroscopy and sports injury at the Government Multispecialty Hospital, Omandurar, 28-year-old Candrad Isaac’s wobbly knee was fixed using grafts from two sources – his mother’s leg and a cadaver donor, said G. Leonard Ponraj, head of the department. Mr. Issac had suffered multiple ligament injuries in his left knee in a road accident seven years ago. A previous surgery had failed. “We couldn’t use grafts from the patient because they had all been exhausted in his previous surgery. We needed three grafts and so we had to take one from his mother, while two grafts were sourced from a tissue bank in Bengaluru,” he said, adding that this was a first-of-its-kind surgery in the government healthcare system in the State.
Twenty four hours after his surgery, Mr. Isaac said the pain was not very bad now and that he was hoping to walk. “ In about six months, he should be able to do all day-to-day activities,” Dr. Ponraj said. The surgery would have cost over Rs. 3 lakh at a private hospital, he said, and while the graft was sourced by the patient’s family, the procedure was free at the hospital, he said.
(With inputs from R. Sujatha and Zubeda Hamid)
