Port Blair, May 14: A 20-year-old ITI student was brought to GBPH with fracture of left thigh bone and multiple breaks of lower leg bones on the same side. He had met with a road traffic accident at Lamba Line on 16th March, 2024. As the patient was brought to the hospital, he was bleeding profusely since all the long bones of his left leg were badly fractured. After the patient’s blood loss was restored, his thigh bone was operated upon by the Orthopedics team on 17th March. The definitive surgery for the fracture of bones of lower leg (below knee) was purposively delayed since a large part of skin was lost, exposing the bone. However, regular dressing was being done to prevent infection of the injury site.
Two days later, when the thigh bone fracture was stabilized, a team of doctors from ANIIMS comprising of Dr. P.N Suparna, Plastic Surgeon along with Orthopediacians, Dr. Kartik Pande and Dr. Humam Ahmad fixed the fracture of lower leg bone by applying an external fixator to hold the comminuted (more than two pieces) bones in alignment.
The plastic surgeon removed a full thickness skin graft from the right leg (Calf region) of the patient to cover for the loss of skin in the left leg. The two limbs were kept close to each other and the flap was sutured to the left leg recipient area and the donor site was covered with a split skin graft from the right thigh. Once the flap taken up at the open skin loss area heals, final fixation with a nail will be done by the team.
For the first time, the Surgery Department of GBPH has added the facility of Plastic Surgery by appointing Dr. PN Suparna, who has completed her MCH in Plastic Surgery from Nair Hospital, Mumbai. This brings a ray of hope to the Islanders as addition of this super specialist service in GBPH will curtail the need of referring the patients to mainland and the plastic surgery procedure can now be done in port Blair itself with precision and accuracy by the expert specialist. With the addition of this facility, complex open fractures with significant skin loss that were earlier required referrals to the mainland which will now be done at Port Blair itself. This is addition of a new super-specialist service to GBPH and there are more to come.