Chennai :

On April 23, 1976, when Daisy D’Costa was wheeled into the operation theatre she didn’t know she would be the first woman in the country to undergo a bypass surgery. “No one told me. I just vaguely recall someone in surgical scrubs telling my husband, ‘She will live’,” said the octogenarian, 39 years later.

While Daisy was being prepared for the surgery, the mood in the operation theatre was equally tense as the team was about to wield the scalpel for a procedure they had done just once before. “The facilities back then were nothing like what we have now. We had no cath lab (examination room with diagnostic imaging equipment), no cardiologist or cardio-anesthetist. No one in the team had done a bypass surgery before,” said Dr K M Cherian, the doctor in the surgical scrubs who assured Daisy’s husband.

Daisy had been brought to the Railway Hospital in Perambur the previous evening with total blockage in an artery. “I had skipped going to the cinema with my husband as I was really tired. All of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe normally and I felt a tightness in my chest. My son, who was at home, rushed me to the nearest hospital,” recalled Daisy. “The doctors managed to resuscitate me. In my haze, I heard someone say, ‘We need to cut her open’, and I blacked out again.”

Daisy needed a coronary artery bypass surgery. The procedure entailed restoring the blood flow to the heart muscle by diverting the blood around the blocked section by using a harvested vein from the leg. Although the first such surgery was performed in the US in the 60′s, the concept was new in India. In June 1975, Kajah Mohideen, a 42-year-old engineer from Integral Coach Factory, became the first in the country to undergo the surgery.

“The procedure on Daisy was no different from Kajah’s, but Daisy’s veins in her legs were thinner and harder to reach because of the fat. Besides that, we followed the same process. I still remember every conversation and the mood in the theatre,” says Dr Cherian, who had also operated on Kajah. “We didn’t even have a process of magnifying the blood vessels, which is mandatory now. I used my eyes to find the vessels that are 1.5 to 2mm. I was young back then,” said Dr Cherian, chuckling. The procedure took a little more than three hours.

Daisy woke up to find shutterbugs queuing to interview her. “That’s when I realised I was the first woman,” she said, smiling and showing a sepia-tinted newspaper showing a younger version of her. Although through the years she has had minor chest problems, she didn’t have to go under the scalpel again.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai / by Ekatha Ann John, TNN / July 09th, 2015