Fighting fat: Rare surgery in city

Pankhoori Sinha / TNN / Dec 28, 2005, 00:31 IST

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An American patient was operated for morbid obesity in an effort to reduce the patient's weight.

NEW DELHI: In a rare form of surgery in India, an American patient was operated for morbid obesity where doctors performed a bypass of the stomach, in an effort to reduce the patient's weight.
Kanita Annette Raheja (29), a resident of Texas, underwent Roux-en-Y gastric bypass at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital on December 21. She was discharged from the hospital on Tuesday.
Said Dr Pradeep Chowbey, the doctor who performed the surgery: "Gastric bypass surgery is a bariatric surgery performed on patients suffering from extreme obesity.
The idea is to reduce the patient's food intake by reducing the size of the stomach. Here the patient was suffering from morbid obesity, which means she was overweight by 40-50 kgs."

Under gastric bypass surgery, the stomach is made smaller by creating a small pouch at the top of the stomach, using surgical staples. This pouch is then connected to the small intestines, bypassing the rest of the stomach....
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However, at Sir Ganga Ram hospital, doctors used the laproscopic technique to operate upon the patient, whereby small incisions, measuring 5-10 mm were made on the abdomen.
"Due to the pouch, the patient will consume less amount of food, therefore regulating her diet. Nor does the surgery entail any side-effects and neither will the patient be on any post-operative medication," explained Dr Chowbey.

He further said that Kanita would come under normal weight category in two years' time.
Said Kanita: "The problem started when I had my second child. I started gaining weight after that and no kind of exercise or diet programme seemed to be helping.
The doctors back home did recommend this surgery, but my insurance couldn't cover it. So we started looking for alternatives online when we came across the fact that such surgeries were being performed in India as well. ...
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So we came here." And her decision didn't disappoint Kanita, as not only she was discharged just six days after her operation, but it cost her around Rs 1.5 lakh, as compared to Rs 25-30 lakh that she would have to pay in US.
"Sir Ganga Ram Hospital started performing such surgeries in 2003. Till now we've 65 of such operations, the highest in this country," said Dr Chowbey, chairman, department of minimal access surgery in the hospital.

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