A City hospital today claimed to have achieved a milestone by successfully performing a rare surgery to straighten a ‘S’ shaped spine of a teenager boy from Kolkata.

The 14-year old boy was diagnosed with ‘Idiopathic Scoliosis’, a medical condition in which a person’s spine has an abnormal sideways curve, usually in a ‘S’ or a ‘C’ shape.

The boy had a curved spine that made him to bend too low, to the extent of 100 degrees, to the left side. (Idiopathic Scoliosis means ‘the reason for such titled deformity is unknown’).

As he was brought to KG Hospital, its Chairman Dr. G. Bakthavathsalam put the patient under the care of a team of doctors consisting of Dr. A. Sakthivel, Chief Orthopedic Surgeon, Dr. R. Karthikeyan, Spine Surgeon, and Dr. R. Senthil Kumar, Anesthetist, who performed a marathon operation that lasted nine-and-a half-hours, a press release from the hospital said today.

“After three days’ stay in the Intensive Care Unit on ventilator support (for two days), the patient has been now shifted to the ward and will be discharged in another couple of days,” Bakthavathsalam said.

After the corrective surgery, the patient has now gained a height of 8 cm and has started standing and sitting erect and breathing easy, he said adding that it was indeed a “cosmetic and functional surgery” as not only the physical appearance of the patient had now got a face lift but also his normal activity too had been improved.

Stating that Idiopathic Scoliosis normally occurs in girls, he said that such occurrence in boys is a rare phenomenon. Only one in one lakh population is susceptible to scoliosis, Baktavatsalam, said.

“The operation was performed in two stages. In the first stage Thoracotomy was done in which surgical incision was made to ease the lungs from the pressure exerted by the bent spinal cord. In the second stage, cantilevering was done with the help of screws to stabilize the spinal cord,” Dr. Karthikeyan said and added that the teenager could play football in another six months.