The doctors at the Lifeline Nursing Home in central Kolkata claimed to have performed a rare laparoscopic surgery to treat diaphragmatic hernia — a rare case of hernia in which intestinal fat from the stomach spills over to the chest cavity and blocks the lungs — on a septuagenarian woman.

They claimed that only 20 such successful surgeries have been performed in the world and this is the first time that it was conducted in Bengal.

For 75-year-old Haliman Bibi pain in her chest had become a part of her life. When an X-ray revealed that she had a lesion in her lungs, the doctors, at first, believed it to be cancerous. Later, a couple of doctors decided to perform a CT scan which revealed that the lesion was not cancerous but diaphragmatic hernia.

“I was told by a couple of doctors about the patient who had been living in spite of being diagnosed with lung cancer. It was then that we ordered a CT scan which revealed that she had this rare form of hernia,” said Sarfaraz Jalil Baig, laparoscopic surgeon, who performed the operation on her last week.

With the patient having several old age related problems like hypertension and diabetes, the doctors thought that it would be difficult to perform a surgery in which they had to open the thorax or abdomen of Bibi to remove the lesion.

“Moreover, she had been surviving on only a single lung for over a year and it would have been difficult for her to survive such an operation which was why we decided to perform this rare laparoscopic surgery on her,” said Baig.

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