A plastic whistle, which had remained stuck in a 10-year-old boy's windpipe for the last seven years, has been successfully taken out by a city-based physician after a complex surgery.
Himanshu Thakkar, an ENT doctor,performed the operation on the boy, Vishmay Nakum, and removed the object last week. Vishmay is a resident of Sutrapada town in Gir-Somnath district.
According to the boy's family members, Vishmay had swallowed a plastic whistle when he was three-year-old. Since then he regularly fell ill with trachea infection and cough, and was used to be admitted in hospital almost every month.
The boy was finally admitted to Thakkar's hospital here and CT scan and X-ray reports showed a whistle stuck deep in his windpipe, causing infection to his lungs.
"The operation was not easy. The procedure, called bronchoscopy, was risky as the boy's internal organs were delicate and his lungs could have been damaged even with a minor surgical error," Thakkar said.
"Vital organs like heart and lungs are very close and therefore the operation was very risky. But we succeeded in removing the stuck object without any complication."
"This will go down as a rare case in the history of medical science," the surgeon maintained.
The boy needed to stay in the hospital for just a day and was discharged the next morning, Thakkar said.
