Doctors have given a new lease of life to a 12-year-old boy from Telangana’s Peddapalli district by performing a complex bilateral lobar lung transplant. The procedure was necessitated after the child accidentally consumed paraquat, a highly toxic herbicide, causing irreversible damage to his lungs.
A bilateral lobar lung transplant is a surgery where doctors only use a carefully sized part (a lobe) of each adult donor lung to fit and replace both diseased lungs in a patient. “The boy was given supportive care and appropriate medications to treat a secondary bacterial infection. While his liver and kidney parameters gradually returned to normal, his lungs continued to deteriorate,” said Visveswaran Balasubramanian, senior consultant interventional pulmonology specialist at Yashoda Hospitals, Hyderabad.
The patient’s condition was so critical that he required a mechanical ventilator and was subsequently placed on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO), an advanced life support system that oxygenates blood outside the body. Despite two weeks of intensive ECMO support, there was no improvement in his lung function, leaving a transplant as the only viable option for survival.
After extensive counseling with the family, the boy was listed for an emergency lung transplant through the Jeevandan programme. The doctors then performed the surgery where the surgical team had to remove and adapt sections of the donor lungs to fit the 12-year-old’s chest cavity.