Rare surgery gives boy a new lease of life

HYDERABAD: Suffering from bone cancer in the right leg, 11-year-old Yashwant Verma from Bapatla had suffered a fracture a few weeks ago. Cancer cells had damaged his bones. When specialised cancer hospitals in Hyderabad recommended complete amputation of the leg right from the hip, his family had lost all hope. But Verma, a student of Class V, got a new lease of life through Rotationplasty, an operative procedure by which a major part of his leg was salvaged.
Doctors at Kamineni Hospital, where the surgery was performed in the first week of April, claimed that the procedure, in which only the portion with the tumour is removed and the remaining part of the limb reattached, was done for the first time in Andhra Pradesh.
Avoiding the surgical options of amputation or metal joint reconstruction, Dr Kishore B Reddy, the orthopaedic oncologist who performed the surgery, said that the lesser known Rotationplasty procedure is a boon for patients like Verma.
Addressing a press conference on Wednesday, he said that amputation from the hip would have meant loss of three joints - the hip, knee and ankle. "Walking, standing, and even sitting are greatly affected,'' said Dr Reddy.
Verma, who was diagnosed with bone cancer last year, is now recovering well post surgery and can perform day to day tasks without much trouble in about three to four months. "He was not going to school for the past six months. At other hospitals, we were either told to go to Mumbai or get the complete leg amputated," said P Poornima, his mother.
Dr Kishore Reddy said that once the tumour was removed, the remaining leg was rotated 180 degrees and reattached to the thigh. The foot and ankle then function as a knee joint. After some time, an artificial leg would be attached.
Doctors said that Rotationplasty when compared to an amputation allows for better functioning of the artificial leg. Children who undergo prosthetic replacement, especially those with a significant amount of growth left, are likely to require additional surgical procedures throughout their lifetime as a result of limb length discrepancy, and prosthesis failure. But those who undergo Rotationplasty do not require any additional surgery, Dr Reddy added.