UK teen's 7 month-wait ends with 5-hour surgery in city hospital Toufiq Rashid
New Delhi, August 11: Stepping into the ICU, Karen Knott stared at her son's face hidden in a web of tubes and oxygen mask which covered half his face. Tears started rolling as Elliot, 14, slowly opened his eyes on hearing his mother's voice.
"I am relieved," she said. The wait had been long. Elliot's surgery to restore the original position of his slipped vertebra lasted for more than five hours after starting at 10am. The teenager was injured in an ice-skating accident on New Year's Eve in Dorchester, UK.
"I am hopeful everything will go well," says Karen, 44, who arrived in India for the surgery on Monday.
The surgery was a test of nerves for the team of eight doctors, headed by Dr Yash Gulati, the spine surgeon at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital. A British news channel crew filmed the surgery as doctors drilled six screws as thick as "half of the index finger and as long" into Elliot's bones to restore his overlapping vertebrae.
The surgery has become a media event in Britain after Elliot was asked by the National Health Service there to wait nearly a year to get specialised help for his spondylolisthesis — a condition where a slipped vertebra presses on a nerve. The shooting pain extended from Elliot's back to his leg and made him immobile.
The NHS asked the family to wait 17 weeks to see a consultant and another nine months for surgery. The case was widely reported in the British media as a example of the mess the NHS is in.
"The qualified doctors in UK have no jobs and are moving out of the country for work..." said Peter Lane, Correspondent for Channel 5, who followed Elliot to India.
That a developing country like India has become a hub for "medical tourism" also generated interest. "People would ask questions like why India. So we wanted to see for ourselves how the medical facilities are," Lane added.
While Karen was satisfied with the ways things have gone, the crew seemed equally impressed. "The doctors in India are excellent," the Channel 5 correspondent said.
Dr Gulati said the surgery was not simple. Called "instrumented spinal fusion", the doctors graft bones from the pelvis region and to the vertebra. They are then put in place by a set of screws and rods — the "pedicle screw system".
"The surgery went well. Better than what we expected," Dr Gulati said. The success is significant as Anil K Maini, president, corporate development at Indraprastha Apollo, puts it: "As media is covering it, the success of the surgery would get more patients to India."