Doctors remove 3-kg tumour from infant

In a rare surgery performed at Sion Hospital, doctors removed a 3-kg tumour from the stomach of a nine-month-old baby girl weighing 10kg. She was recently brought to the hospital from Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh with complaints of progressive distension of the abdomen from the day she was born. Sonu suffered pain while eating, sleeping and during her daily routine because of the rare tumour growing inside her stomach, starting from her abdominal muscles to her backside.

Sonu’s mother, Durgavati Yadav, brought her to Mumbai as doctors in UP said that there was no chance of her surviving and they could not treat her. Meanwhile, neighbours requested Sonu’s father to take his daughter to a doctor as the protrusion looked unnatural.

Speaking to The Asian Age, Dr Paras Kothari, head of paediatric surgery, said, “Upon medical examination, it was found that a tumour weighing about 3kg was inside her body. All necessary medical tests were conducted before she was taken for surgery. It took us seven hours to remove the tumour which had spread from her stomach down to near her spleen and pancreas and reached her backside. We even removed the tailbone to avoid a repeat of the tumour, which resulted in her having trouble passing motions. After removal of the tumour, we sent it for testing.”

The tumour encompassed major blood vessels and organs posing a huge challenge for doctors to remove it.

“A major blood vessel was passing through the tumour. It was a mature, full-grown tumour and weighed 3kg. It was pushing the kidneys down. The baby’s weight was around nine to 10kg,” added Dr Kothari. A team of doctors took all of seven hours to puncture, detach and remove the tumour from Sonu’s body.

While the baby is still at Sion Hospital after a successful surgery, she will be discharged after a few days. “In this case, the weight of the tumour was half the weight of the baby. Actually, things would have been revealed in pre-natal sonography but unfortunately, we don’t give that much importance to pre-natal sonography and have inadequate testing of the baby when it is inside the womb. Had it been detected earlier, it would not have been this difficult for both the child and doctors. We are happy that the baby is faring well and gaining weight,” said Dr Suleman Merchant, dean of the hospital.