49-year-old man undergoes complex windpipe surgery

Initially, the man was kept on ventilator support for a long time and a temporary tracheostomy was done by creating an opening in the neck and a tube was placed in the windpipe to allow air to enter the lungs. He, however, developed breathing difficulty after a month after tracheostomy.

Further investigations revealed that the windpipe had narrowed, and stents were placed for easy flow of air to lungs. But,doctors noticed that in an unusual instance, the patient continued to have difficulty in breathing post non-surgical interventions for dilation.

The team of surgeons at Gleneagles Global Health City headed by Dr Govini Balasubramani and Dr Raja Sundaram decided to reconstruct hiswindpipe as major non-invasive methods failed to stabilise the patient.

“The patient had a severerespiratory problem due to windpipe stenosis since he underwent a tracheostomy, a medical procedure that involves creating an opening in the neck in order to place a tube into the windpipe,” said Dr Govini Balasubramani, a senior consultant of cardiothoracic surgery, heart and lung transplantation.

“The most challenging part of the tracheal reconstruction surgery was to save his voice box from damage due to surgery. After the surgery, the patient was able to breathe freely and was discharged within a week,” added Balasubramani.

Doctors say that stenosis can be caused by either cuff-induced damage to the windpipe or owing to procedures such as a tracheostomy, or a combination of the two. Non-operative treatments, including repeated dilation, laser treatment, and prolonged or permanent stentingwith T tubes and other stents, are mainly used to stabilise the stenosis before surgical intervention.