All-women team at Mumbai civic hospital performs complex Cesarean on woman with stuck placenta

Mumbai: An all-women team of medicos and nurses successfully performed a complex life-saving Cesarean section surgery on a pregnant woman with the placenta stuck to the uterus walls, at a civic peripheral hospital, an official said here on Monday.

On November 16, a 32-year-old woman was rushed for delivery to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)’s VN Desai Hospital in Andheri.

What appeared to be a normal Cesarean section turned out to be an obstetrician’s worst nightmare with potentially fatal consequences for both the mother and the baby, said the team head, Dr. Komal Chavan, Senior Consultant and DNB teacher.

“It was almost a full 40-week pregnancy and the patient had a history of two previous Cesareans with anterior (front side) low lying placenta with very high blood pressure. The woman has two sons from her previous pregnancies,” Dr. Chavan told IANS.

A scan was ordered to check the status of the placenta vis-à-vis the uterine wall, but after the sonography report ruled out the adherent (stuck) placenta, the woman was scheduled for a Cesarean delivery on November 17.

Dr. Chavan, along with her teammates, Dr. Snehal Shinde, Dr. Neha Panwar, Dr. Subhani Mahapatra, Dr. Sapna Wadhwani and senior Nurse Sayali Gurav, started the surgery and they helped deliver a healthy baby girl weighing 4-kgs.

However, there was a shocking surprise in store for them as the placenta was completely stuck to the woman’s uterine wall, and a part of it was severely embedded, posing a fresh challenge to the medical team.

“We had to take a very quick decision to perform a difficult obstetric hysterectomy on the patient due to heavy bleeding, and owing to the adhesions after her previous surgeries, we removed the uterus to save her life,” Dr. Chavan said.

Dr. Chavan explained that such cases of stuck placenta were rare, about one in thousands of deliveries, but now it has become a rising trend. “It is a rising trend to almost 0.9 per cent of all deliveries, attributable to surgeries on the uterus, fertility-enhancing surgeries, fibroid treatments, certain types of medication, etc,” Dr. Chavan explained.

The VN Desai Hospital Medical Superintendent Dr. Harbhans Singh Bava is all praises for the all-women team for exhibiting their “operative skills, quick decisions, timely management, and excellent teamwork that helped manage such a major case in a peripheral hospital successfully”.

Last weekend, both the new-born and her mother were discharged and are now convalescing at their home in Khar.