On Wednesday afternoon, R. Venkata Sai Teja, was busy on a mobile phone, trying to access his class X examination results. Unlike the rest of his classmates in Ongole, Andhra Pradesh though, Venkata Sai was on a hospital bed in Chennai. Despite having undergone his 29{+t}{+h}surgery three days ago, the 16-year-old was cheerful. “This was my final surgery and now I’m done!” he said.
In 2011, when Venkata Sai was 11, he was admitted to Kanchi Kamakoti Childs Trust Hospital after severe electrical burns – on a rainy evening, a high tension wire above their home’s balcony had snapped, and he had come into contact with it. “His mother found him hanging from the wire,” said his father, Prasad Rao, a paddy farmer in Ongole.
“Venkata Sai came in with over 80 per cent third-degree burns, all the way from his neck to below his waist. He was treated in the ICU for several weeks. It was a difficult case — he had several infections — but he made it. Since then, he has had to come in regularly for surgeries,” said K. Mathangi Ramakrishnan, chief of plastic surgery and burns at the hospital. The teenager said his uncle, an IT professional in Dubai, was helping with medical costs.
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For the past year, Venkata Sai studied every day for three hours. “Six to nine p.m. were my study hours. I didn’t go for tuitions as we did everything at school,” he said. Over the last few months though, studying was become difficult due to a post-burn contracture neck. “I studied using a neck collar and sometimes, it was painful. I couldn’t lift my neck,” he said.
“Over the years, the burns healed, forming scar tissue. But as Venkata Sai grew, the scar tissue on his neck remained as it was, leading to a contracture. When he came to us, we decided to perform a microsurgical free flap,” said Dr. Mathangi. In this procedure, doctors took a flap of skin from his forearm and used it to extend his neck. The wound on his forearm was then covered with a skin graft from his thigh. This is a microsurgical reconstruction, explained G. Karthikeyan, professor of plastic surgery at Government Kilpauk Hospital and one of the five members of a team who performed the four-hour surgery.
On Friday evening, there was joy in the hospital room – the teen had passed with a 9.0 GPA. “I want to study computer science next, and then get into an engineering college,” he said.
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Four years after suffering severe burns, a 16-year-old tastes academic success and looks ahead