In the span of a week, young Abhayakumar had a taste of hell and heaven. The six-year-old had little idea of things to come when he boarded an autorickshaw to see his aunt off at the Chengannur railway station on December 20 afternoon.
In a flash, everything changed for him as a speeding car collided with the autorickshaw in which the boy was travelling along with his uncle and aunt. The boy lost part of his face in the accident and was brought to Specialist Hospital here by night.
“Policemen retrieved the damaged portion of the boy's face from the accident site and sent it in another ambulance by the time he was brought here,” said Raju, the boy's uncle. The doctors tried to clean up the severed portion of his face, which included nose, upper lip, a portion of lower lip and a portion of cheek, and re-plant it to original position.
“The severed portion had all the bones and flesh intact, but was highly contaminated. Another daunting task was that blood vessels were so small that chances of success were less,” said Dr. R. Jayakumar, head of the Department of Plastic and Micro-vascular Surgery, who headed the surgery.
Dr. Jayakumar, who addressed the press meet to announce the success of the surgery on Thursday at the hospital, along with Dr. K.R. Rajappan, director of the hospital, said that no available literature showed that successful execution of composite facial graft, that too involving only a portion of the face, was done in the country till date.
Putting the boy under sedation for the surgery was a difficult task as normal procedure of inserting tracheal tube could not be followed, partly because the surgery involved knitting up the lips and nose. “The anaesthetic team comprising Dr. Nisheed and Dr. Shaina did that for us, as plastic surgeons Dr. M. Senthil Kumar and Dr. Jewel and maxillofacial surgeon Dr. George worked with me as a team,” Dr. Jayakumar said.
Things seemed to have worked in favour of this Class I student at Government LP School, Thalachira in Pathanamthitta. “The critical issue is proper preservation of the severed body organ and bringing it over on time. In this case, the body portion was properly packed and refrigerated. It is always advisable to bring in severed body organs to the hospital within six hours,” said Dr. Rajappan.
Abhayakumar can leave the hospital in a few days and in three months time, he can go back to normal life. “When I met him on Wednesday, he promised not to cry if he was given a cricket bat and ball,” said Dr. Jayakumar.
