Doctors replace thigh bone of 12-year-old cancer patient, kid resumes walking, climbing

Chennai: Doctors at a private hospital in Chennai successfully performed an 8-hour long procedure to replace the Femur (thigh bone) of a 12-year old Bangladeshi boy, who was diagnosed with Osteosarcoma (Bone Cancer that affects only the long bones).

The doctors said the young boy was discharged and able to walk with support, barely five days after surgery.

It was earlier believed that children diagnosed with this condition don’t survive longer than six months and the only treatment option used to be amputation. However, with recent advances in treatment, chemotherapy is performed and the cancerous tumor can be shrunk, following which the limb is replaced with a prosthetic one.

While in the case of a kidney or liver transplant, the organ must be from a donor, in case of bone transplants, doctors opt for a replacement that is made of titanium-cobalt-chromium alloy.

The team that treated the patient said that he was able to walk with the support of a single crutch nearly after a month of discharge. Six weeks after discharge, he was able to walk without support and climb stairs.

The orthopedic surgeon Dr R Sankar of Apollo Hospitals, said that the procedure of limb salvage was a less traumatic experience for the young patient and enabled limb functionality, as opposed to amputation.

“This child is going to grow and by the time he’s an adult, we would have to perform 2-3 surgeries to extend the limb and joint, as what we have done is an artificial joint replacement. We can say that with this artificial limb, he can have a good quality of life for nearly 20-25 years,” Dr Sankar told Zee Media when asked about follow-up treatment.

On the non-Covid cases and emergency surgeries being done at the hospital, Dr Suneeta Reddy, Managing Director, Apollo Hospitals group told Zee Media that about 30 percent of the cases across their hospitals were non-Covid cases, which were being handled in an area fully separated from the Covid-19 wards.

With state-level lockdowns in place, road accident cases have reduced, whereas there is a spike in cases of elderly and children sustaining fall, fracture injuries at home, Reddy added.