LAGOS, Nigeria
Nigeria's National Hospital has live-tweeted an open-heart surgery conducted on an eight-year-old girl – the first time for a Nigerian hospital to give the public a glimpse into a medical theater via social media.
The hospital gave Twitter followers a play-by-play of the procedure, beginning with the surgeons’ entry into the Trauma Center, where the patient underwent ventricular septal defect repair (VSDR).
VSDR, the hospital said, is “a procedure [aimed at repairing] a hole in the heart”, adding that the girl had been born with the defect.
The hospital was not the first in Nigeria to perform open-heart surgery, but the live-tweets of the operation were unprecedented in the country's medical history.
The country’s first-ever open-heart surgery was performed in 1974 by a joint team of foreign and local surgeons at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Nigeria’s southeastern Enugu State.
The procedure was led by Sir Magdi Yacoub, a U.K.-based British-Egyptian cardiothoracic surgeon who was joined by a number of Nigerian surgeons, including Prof. Fabian Udekwu.
Three of the seven patients operated upon at the time, however, later died of “operative mortality”.
The first all-Nigerian open-heart surgery was conducted at the University of Ibadan Teaching Hospital in 1978, but the patient died during the procedure.
The first successful open-heart surgery by an all-Nigerian surgical team was in 1979.
In one of Tuesday’s live-tweets, the National Hospital said the patient’s heart was working fine after the patient was successfully taken off the bypass machine where the procedure had taken place.
Since then, the hospital has provided no further updates.
