BHUBANESWAR: Doctors at AIIMS Bhubaneswar successfully saved the life of a nine-year-old boy by performing a bronchoscopic intervention to remove a stitching needle lodged in his lungs.
The achievement marks the first instance of removing such sharp foreign bodies without resorting to open surgery in any paediatrics centre in Odisha. The innovative procedure, available at AIIMS Bhubaneswar and only a few centres across India, utilises less invasive flexible bronchoscopy for the removal of sharp airway foreign bodies.
The young patient from West Bengal was brought to AIIMS Bhubaneswar after aspirating a stitching needle, approximately four cm in length, into the left lower lobe bronchus lateral segment of the lungs. The expert team of paediatricians including Dr Rashmi Ranjan Das and Dr Krishna M Gulla performed bronchoscopic interventions to extract the needle without encountering any complications.
The condition of the patient, admitted for four days post-procedure, is now stable. The process that took around one hour spared the teenager from thoracotomy. “Such a surgery could have jeopardised the boy’s health, potentially requiring the removal of a portion of the lungs,” said Dr Das.
Executive director of AIIMS Dr Ashutosh Biswas congratulated the team for the feat.