Kudos to Dr. Albert Shun of Westmead Children's Hospital in Sydney, Australia.
A surgeon has used a ping pong ball to keep a little girl alive after a world first liver transplant operation.
The £1 plastic ball prevents Mackenzie Argaet's new liver from pressing against vital arteries, which could kill the two-year-old.
Dr Albert Shun wanted to create a barrier because the adult-sized organ would otherwise be too large for her infant body.
The piece of sports equipment will now remain in the Australian girl's body for what is expected to be the rest of her life.
Her parents, Letice Darswell and Guy Argaet, were surprised by the move but are thrilled by the recovery of their feisty daughter, who was born with rare disorder biliary artresia, which destroys the ducts that carry bile from the liver.
'We didn't get told about the ping pong ball until after the operation,' Miss Darswell told Sydney's Daily Telegraph.
'I couldn't believe my ears when Dr Shun told us that he had used a ping pong ball to not only support the liver but to keep it from pressing down on vital blood vessels.
'The doctor has performed a miracle. The whole family is now referring to him as "Dr God".
‘She is so normal now. She is a happy kid.
‘She is playing with her brother Lachlan and learning to ride a bike, something she wasn't able to do before.’
But Mackenzie, who today grinned as she ran around the garden of her family home in Canberra, is yet to find out about the simple item keeping her alive.
Dr Shun, who works at Sydney's Westmead Children's Hospital, said her new liver will in time grow around the ping pong ball without causing any infections.
'There shouldn't be any complications,' he said today.
'We've had to use a portion of an adult sized liver because here in Australia we have a low donor rate, which means we have to be adaptable.
'The ping pong ball was the perfect answer. It won't deteriorate, it won't create an infection - and it was cheap!'
Dr Shun had been using a sponge to keep Mackenzie's liver separated from the blood vessels but said 'there was no way I could close her up the way it was.'
So he telephoned his wife from the hospital and asked her to hurry around to Woolworth's supermarket and buy him some table tennis balls.
Ingenious! How many doctors would think of something so ordinary, so commonplace, to save a child's life?
Peter
3 comments:
Wonder if it's an Australien thing.
I saw one of those medical shows on TV once, and it showed a story about a young man in the Australian outback that got a head injury playing football. The bleeding started pushing on his brain, and it was getting critical, so the local doctor, not having any equipment for it, went out to the toolshed and got a wooden drill, and used it to drill through his skullbone to leviate preassure.
Not a powerdrill, the oldfashioned handcranked one!
You just have to admire this kind of ingenuity, you cant teach it.
He, googled for the story above, and happened to find this:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3559479.ece
In RT school they told us that waaaay back in the day, doctors used to use sterilized ping-pong balls after lung resections to hold the remaining lung in place. He brought in x-rays; seeing ping pong balls in the lung is just the weirdest thing!
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