by Renato Botto (ANSA) – TURIN, APRIL 16 – With her heart and one lung crushed by a tumor mass she managed to give birth and a few weeks later, thanks to a long and risky surgery, she was able to free herself from the danger that loomed over her life.
A story of healthcare excellence, which concerns a 22-year-old mother and her baby, who is now 4 months old. Both are at home, in a town in the province of Turin after the most important stages experienced in two hospitals of the Città della Salute of Turin: the obstetric-gynecological Sant’Anna and the Molinette.
In 2019 the girl was diagnosed with chest sarcoma, an aggressive malignant tumor “I wasn’t well, but at first I blamed the stress for the final exam. – she says – Then the lymph nodes got swollen, the first diagnosis at the hospital from Ivrea was of a cyst. We are a family of farmers and when we went up to the mountain pastures in the Aosta Valley, at 2,200 meters, I began to have a fever and to lose weight. So at the Aosta hospital they did a lung x-ray “. Then the biopsy revealed the sarcoma. “I was no longer breathing, the doctors sent me into an induced coma and put a stent between my bronchial tubes. But they feared that when I woke up I would have a bad life”. The young woman fights against evil, under treatment at the San Luigi di Orbassano (Turin) and then at the Candiolo Institute, where she is followed by Dr. Giovanni Grignani. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy conquer metastases, but that boulder in her chest remains there. Surgical removal is not recommended due to the very high risk of damaging vital organs.
The enormous difficulties do not dampen the plans of the girl and her partner who decide to have a child, even though they are aware of the risks to the woman’s heart. Thus a cesarean birth was planned, at the Sant’Anna, performed by Professor Alberto Revelli and Dr. Silvana Arduino.
Successful birth but a few months later the conditions of the young girl worsen again: the lungs are increasingly compressed. There is nothing left to do but remove the tumor mass, even if it is glued to the walls of the heart to a large part of the left lung.
Thoraco-pulmonary surgeons (coordinated by Professor Enrico Ruffini), with the collaboration of cardiac surgeons (directed by Professor Mauro Rinaldi), study all possible solutions.
And they give indications for the operation at the Molinettes: the operation lasts 6 hours, performed by Professor Enrico Ruffini, doctors Marco Pocar, Paraskevas Lyberis and Matteo Roffinella. The tumor, which weighs a kilo and a half, is removed, preserving the heart and restoring full lung function. After 10 days the young woman returns home and after a month her heart starts beating normally again and her breathing returns to normal.
“This extraordinary result – comments Giovanni La Valle, general manager of the Città della Salute – is the result of a great teamwork of professionals, who courageously face extreme cases with frontier interventions, which increasingly demonstrate the role of Hub and reference of the City of Health“. (HANDLE).
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