Girl detected with rare tumour; operated upon

A girl fighting a rare tumour in her chest since she was 10-year-old, breathed a sigh of relief after she underwent a successful five-hour long surgery.

The girl was detected with a huge tumour, weighing around 3.2 kg, which sat right in the middle of her chest compressing one side of her lungs and heart causing deformity in the chest wall.

“She was diagnosed with Mediastinal Teratom -- a Mediastinal Tumour, wherein Mediastinal is the cavity that separates lungs from the rest of the chest. This is a very rare case,” Consultant Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeon of Bangalore’s M. S. Ramaiah Narayana Heart Centre Dr Jayanta Kumar Das told PTI.

“The CT scan showed a huge tumour occupying the right lung, right plural cavity pushing the heart further to the left. This was a complicated high-risk case and required skill and precision to perform such a surgery in the thorax region to remove the tumour located between the heart and the lungs,” he said from Bangalore.

He said that he had seen similar cases in the last few years, but not of this particular type as the girl suffered from.

“It arises from the Pluripotent or Embryonic cell trapped during developmental stages...but for cases like this there is no alternative treatment except surgery,” he said.

This kind of tumour resection was done using Cardio Pulmonary Bypass machine in M. S. Ramaiah Narayana Heart Centre, Das said.

“In this case also we had kept this as a back-up option,” he said.

It took a five-hour-long surgery for Dr. Das and his team comprising Shilpa Rudradevaru, Anil Kumar and Ravi Naik to remove the tumour.

An elated father of the girl, whose name was withheld on family’s request, said: “There was a time when we were denied treatment by almost every hospital. No one was willing to treat her because of our financial disability and also due to the surgery which was highly risky.”

“Our daughter has got a new life and we are thankful to the doctors that she is breathing easy again,” the girl’s mother said. - PTI

The tumour was in the middle of chest compressing one side of lungs and heart