Your heart is in safe hands: Hyd cardiologist performs bypass surgery on patient with 12 stents

Hyderabad: When 55-years-old Subba Rayudu, a diabetic patient from Hyderabad, started feeling pain in his chest, he was terrified. He had 12 stents in his heart and was worried about surgery. But fortunately, he ended up in the right hands of Dr. Prateek Bhatnagar, an eminent cardiologist in the country.

"We have operated on patients with three-four stents where there is still some place left to put a bypass. But this patient had 12 stents and there was hardly any space to put a bypass," explains Dr. Bhatnagar.

Dr. Bhatnakar, a cardiologist practising in Hyderabad for the last 21 years, admits it was a unique surgery compared with the surgeries he had performed so far. At the same time, he says that nobody should land into such a problem, no surgeon should have a similar nightmare.

A coronary artery stent is a small metal tube that is inserted into the coronary artery to prevent the artery from closing again. It is usually placed during or after the process of angioplasty (a medical procedure used to open blocked coronary arteries).

"It all started when the patient started feeling pain in the chest. It persisted when he was walking or even sitting. His condition was so bad that anytime he could get a heart attack," Dr. Bhatnagar explains.

Many times, people fear surgeries and go for stents. A blockage in the heart is usually treated either through a simple medical treatment, through the placement of stents, or through bypass surgeries. Dr. Bhatnagar insists that people should not run away from bypass surgery and instead consider it the first option.

"It's easier to do surgery when it's simple than after the placement of a lot of stents. In this patient, out of the 12 stents, 10 were blocked and the arteries on the stents had become very hard, like steel," he says.

Another unique thing about this surgery was that it was done on a beating heart, i.e., surgery performed without stopping the beating of the heart. "The open-heart surgery technique would have created a lot of problems in this patient. So, we went for a beating heart surgery technique," explains Dr. Bhatnagar.

Open-heart surgery is performed with the help of a heart-lung bypass pump which performs the function of the patient's heart and lungs while the original heart is stopped for the surgery.

Dr. Bhatnagar, who did his MBBS from Kanpur in UP and MD in cardiology from Chandigarh, has many firsts to his credit. In June 2018, he successfully performed the world's first coronary surgery on a patient who had a twisted heart, a condition called Mesocardia. It is a medical condition where the heart is abnormally located in the central part of the thorax. A report on the same was published in the July 2018 issue of Annals of Thoracic Surgery, the world's best-ranked cardiac surgery journal published in the USA.