Tuesday was a big day for an eight-year-old girl who was going under the knife to repair a hole in her heart. She got the procedure done in National Hospital Abuja and the hospital live-tweeted her surgery as it happened.
The surgery lasted about three hours and is the third of 10 major heart operations that the National Hospital Abuja will be carrying out in collaboration with a charity from the United States. According to the hospital, they live-tweeted the open-heart surgery to grow awareness of what the Nigeria's medical capabilities are.
"We have a lot of Nigerians in need of these operations. This is for them to know it is possible to do it in this country," said Dr. Tayo Haastrup, a spokesperson for the hospital.
The first of the live-tweets was posted at 5:47 p.m. of Aug. 11, saying "Happening Now: Open Heart Surgery (Ventricular Septal Defect Repair) Live at the Trauma Centre, National Hospital, Abuja."
From the moment the surgeons were making their preparations to the point the patient was about to go on bypass before the heart was stopped and all the procedures the surgeons took to make the little girl's heart better were documented in a series of tweets from the National Hospital Abuja's Twitter account.
At 9:08 p.m., the patient was taken off the bypass machine, her newly fixed heart given the opportunity to take over as the eight-year-old was closed up.
Open-heart surgery is also referred to as traditional heart surgery but as many heart procedures use only small cuts and not wide openings, "open-heart surgery" can be sometimes misleading as well. According to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, the most common heart surgery type done on adults is coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), during which a healthy vein or artery is attached to one that is blocked to become a new path for blood to flow into the heart.
Those with coronary heart disease commonly get CABG to address arterial hardening which impedes blood flow to the heart. However, the procedure is not without its risks, which include chest wound infections, kidney or lung failure, memory loss, blood loss and breathing difficulty.
