NEW DELHI: A two-year-old girl who punctured her windpipe after falling on a pencil was treated without surgical intervention by doctors at a private hospital here.
According to doctors at Aakash Healthcare in Dwarka, the girl was administered primary care after the accident but developed serious swelling in her body after four hours due to excess air she was breathing through her perforated windpipe.
Air kept accumulating in her chest preventing her lungs to expand fully and obstructing many critical functions.
Had the leak in her windpipe not been plugged and repaired, she would only have survived for a couple of hours more as her heart and lungs were at risk of obstructive shock, doctors said.
Considering her tender age, the doctors chose to shun surgery and relied on rest and natural healing.
"She came to us with a swollen face, neck, chest, abdomen, and eyes which she was not able to open. Ideally, such cases need surgical repair wherein we open the chest, go to the lung, and stitch the site of injury or use glue to connect the ruptured pipe.
"However, using glue carried the risk of re-leak or complete windpipe adhesion," Dr Sameer Punia, Consultant, Paediatric Intensive Care and Paediatrics, Aakash Healthcare, Dwarka, said.
Therefore, doctors located the injury spot through bronchoscopy and kept the area non-functional for three days while the child breathed through a ventilator.
After three days when the doctors checked up on the injury site, they found it healed.
"This is because while any injury in an adult will take five to seven days to heal, in children, lung tissues can heal themselves in 48 hours. She was discharged five days after admission and immediately resumed her normal life," said Dr Syed Hasan, Head of the Department of Paediatrics and Neonatology at Aakash Healthcare.