Belarusian surgeons world-second to perform a complicated lung transplant operation
Breathing full breast. We do not realize how important this faculty is while our lungs are functioning like clockwork. But viruses, infections, bad ecology and stress tend to interfere with the well-coordinated «mechanism». Belarusian surgeons have successfully operated on patients with severe pathology of this organ in recent years. Now the list of operations has been extended with yet another — and the most complex and unique at that.
At present the 58-year-old Vadim Nikolaevich is doing well and getting ready to be discharged. Yet just two weeks ago the man could not even imagine that he would end up on the operating table. A tumor was detected in his left lung calling for immediate surgery. One more was discovered in the right lung after a thorough examination.
There was no time to loose. Therefore, experts of the Department of Thoracic Surgery and Lung Transplantation of the Republican Scientific and Practical Centre of Transplantation of Organs and Tissue decided on one of the most complex operations in the world — autologous basal segments of lung lower lobe transplantation. Such surgery had not been carried out in Belarus before, but that did not stop the surgeons.
— In such cases, the entire diseased organ is usually removed by pneumonectomy, — Sergei Eskov, head of the department, says. — But in this situation, we could not afford it because of the formation in the right lung, which we yet have to deal with. So we had at all costs to keep at least part of the left lung. And we did it.
Surgeons extracted the diseased organ from the chest, removed its upper part, and formed from the remaining healthy part a new smaller organ. All these complex manipulations took nine employees of the center almost six hours to perform. No fewer specialists were involved in the patient’s rehabilitation.
By the way, Belarusian surgeons have become world-second to perform this kind of operation. Japanese were the first.
