At home and breathing on her own. How does a small patient with a diaphragm defect feel after surgery

A small resident of the Brest region, who had a serious defect before birth, underwent a unique operation and was sent home with his mother. As parents and doctors did not give up hope for a positive outcome, they told on the air of the TV channel ONT, reports sb.by.

Tatiana and Alexander Zhukovets had their first child, whom they had been waiting for four years. During pregnancy, the expectant mother was informed that the fetus has a malformation - half of the diaphragm was missing. “This is a very serious defect in which our children have not yet survived. In the world, the mortality rate is about 95 percent. In addition, he also had a heart defect, said Konstantin Drozdovsky, director of the Russian Research Center for Pediatric Surgery.

The young parents decided to keep the baby and fight for him. Tatiana was sent to the RSPC “Mother and Child”. At the 22nd week, doctors performed the first operation in utero. “It is an endoscopic intervention, when still intrauterine to the child under the control of the finest optics in the trachea install a silicone balloon, which inflates, covers the lumen of the trachea, because the child does not breathe there, and the contents accumulated in the lungs allow them to increase in size and gives a chance to develop,” explained Deputy Director for medical work of the RSPC of pediatric surgery Alexander Nikulenkov.

The chance of survival of the infant was estimated at 5-6 percent. Immediately after his birth, he was urgently transferred to the Center for Pediatric Surgery. Here he was connected to ECMO - the apparatus of artificial circulation and respiration, and surgeons performed a unique operation to prosthetic the diaphragm from their own muscles. Then, a week later, a second operation was performed on the heart. The boy was on a ventilator. The baby took an independent breath only on the 50th day.

The happy parents named their son Simon. He's at home now, breathing and eating on his own. “When we were home, I felt like a mother. We are very grateful to the doctors that we are the happy parents of a little boy. We are glad that they helped, and our child coped, said Tatiana.

Konstantin Drozdovsky said that this is not an isolated case when Russian doctors save children with rare and serious diseases. He noted that abroad there are highly specialized centers that deal with such defects, and in our country doctors have learned to treat them in the RSPC. So, with the help of operations, diseases of tissues and bones, congenital cross-sightedness, amniotic stretches and other diseases are corrected. In Belarus for the first time successfully operated on a child with an extremely rare combination of severe birth defects