Tyumen doctors brought back to life the tiny heart of the girl

In the operating room OKB No. 1 unfolded the battle for the life of a five-month-old girl with severe congenital heart disease. The situation was complicated by the fact that the anatomy of the blood vessels of the child's heart was unusual - and no one knew what effort this operation would require. Head of the Children's Department of Anesthesiology and Resuscitation No. 4 Egor Aleksandrovich Karpov saw a lot in practice, but this day will never be forgotten.

“When you take a child in your arms from the hands of a crying mother, you take responsibility for their whole family,” Egor Alexandrovich recalls. I promised that I would come to her as soon as her child's condition allowed. But my team and I did not yet know what challenges we were going to face or how we were going to solve them.”.

And then there's the fight for life. During the operation, acute heart failure developed with a critical decrease in blood pressure, life-threatening arrhythmia began. The children's cardiac team acted as a single mechanism - clearly, quickly, without panic. While the surgeons were checking the sutures, the anesthesiologist, perfusiologist and anesthetic nurses were doing jewelry work: selecting doses of drugs, parameters of perfusion and artificial ventilation of the lungs, so that the small heart worked correctly. “The stabilization of the child took more than an hour,” says the anesthesiologist. We achieved the most important thing – the heart began to work correctly. All this time I remembered the mother of the child who was waiting for me.

All this time, the girl’s mother was sitting in the corridor, holding on with her last strength. When the worst was over, Egor Aleksandrovich came to her and told her about what the doctors had to endure: Your daughter is now hard. The operation is still underway. But the situation became controlled. We're helping her. She'll be fine. She'll fight. And we will fight with her.”.

The girl was saved. Her heart is now working like a clock, the health of the child is no longer threatened. When the mother was allowed into the ward, she approached Yegor Alexandrovich, took him by the elbow, looked into the eyes and nodded silently. “This silence was worth a thousand words,” summed up the anesthetist-resuscitator. The daily work of an anesthesiologist is not only anesthesia and patient monitoring before, during and after surgery. It's also the ability to hold a punch in an emergency, and the ability to support those waiting outside the operating room. Behind every life saved is a team of people who don’t give up.