M A I N   N E W S

Rare bleeding case treated

Kolkata, April 24
Treating a rare case of abnormal bleeding from the gastro-intestinal tract, a doctor-duo here have saved the life of a teenager employing a hitherto unused combination of diagnostic procedures to pinpoint the source of his profuse blood loss.

The two-in-one procedure, extremely rare by Indian standards, made use of a catheter to locate the general area of bleeding and then employed laparoscopy to zero in on the exact location and get rid of the scourge, in this case a piece of abnormally occurring pancreas.

The 16-year-old patient was bleeding profusely from his intestinal region but routine endoscopy or colonoscopy failed to locate the exact spot in his body leaving the doctors worried about the reason of the bleeding.

“The boy was losing a lot of blood and we weren’t being able to locate the origin. That was a little unnerving,” said invasive cardiologist Dr Rabin Chakraborty of city-based Apollo Gleneagles Hospital, part of the team that operated upon the patient last month.

The team then decided to place a catheter from the groin into the bleeding artery and keep it in-situ for further diagnosis.

“Laparoscopy is generally not attempted for such cases as one can not feel the thin catheter through the thick intestinal mesentery. So we pushed in a dye into the region that looked a little odd and confirmed through an intra-operative X-Ray that there indeed was a tumor,” advanced laparoscopic surgeon Dr B. Ramana said. — PTI