In a first for India, Doctors at Hyderabad’s KIMS Hospital have succeeded in ensuring the full recovery of a 12-year-old boy from Lucknow, after 65 days on a life support system called ECMO (Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as his lungs were severely damaged due to a Covid infection.

The young patient, Sourya, suffered from a multi-organ infection due to Covid-19. When the doctors detected advanced Covid pneumonia, he was airlifted from a Lucknow hospital to KIMS Hospital in Hyderabad by the KIMS team.

“Critical Covid illness leads to multiple comorbidities, muscle weakness caused by medications used to treat the primary condition, repeated infections in the bloodstream, and secondary infections in their airways over and above dense non-resolving pneumonia. This is by far the longest reported ECMO bridge to recovery in a child for severe COVID pneumonia,” said Dr Sandeep Attawar of the hospital.

This is probably the only reported case in the country where a child sustained by this mode of life support for over two months has fully recovered. The boy is now ready to go back home.

Dr Sandeep Attawar and the transplant team at the Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) Hospitals received the patient with his lungs fully affected and unable to supply oxygen to his body.

“With ECMO support, his lung rested, gradually healed itself and regained enough function to be able to support him,” explained Dr Vijil of KIMS.

ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) – a technology where blood is sent to a heart-lung machine outside the body to oxygenate blood and remove carbon dioxide.

The boy’s mother Renu Shrivastava and father, Rajeev Saran, an advocate in Lucknow said he wanted the world and people in India to know that thanks to state-of-the-art medical science, and the efforts of doctors and paramedics, the impossible could be made possible.

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