| Vasan Eye Care to start four more hospitals in Kerala
Kochi, April 12. (PTI): Vasan Eye Care, a leading hospital in the State will be starting state-of-the-art hospitals in four more districts in Kerala in a couple of weeks, Dr A M Arun, Chairman, Vasan Health Care Group, said. Addressing reporters here on Tuesday night, Dr Arun, here in connection with the hospital completing one year of service in Kochi, said the Vasan group had already two hospitals in Kochi and Kozhikode and would be opening eye care hospitals at Kannur, Kottayam, Thrissur and Thiruvananthapuram shortly. "Vasan eye care has a happy family of 75,000 patients spread over the length and breadth of the State and more than 6000 successful surgeries have been performed over the last year," he said, adding this includes 3600 cataract surgeries, 1800 Zyoptix laser surgeries and 600 retinal surgeries.
Awake and in pain under the knife
As the cancer patient lay on the operating room table, she felt the surgeon remove her intestines and splay them over her abdomen. Terrified, she was awake but unable to provide a signal -- a wiggle of a toe, the bat of an eyelash -- to communicate the excruciating pain she was suffering. Paralyzed by drugs commonly used during surgery, the woman was trapped in a body that could feel and hear but could not move as a surgeon sliced a tumour from her cecum, a small pouch connected to the colon, deep inside her abdomen. "I couldn't breath[e] and was very scared. I can't find adequate words to describe the horror," she wrote in a letter to the Health Services Appeal and Review Board, made public for the first time today. ". . . I felt my intestines pop out of my body very quickly and they were laid on the right side of my body." Her intestines, she wrote, felt very warm.
Cochlear Implantation Increases Meningitis Risk
Confirming what physicians have long speculated, a new study published in the April edition of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery determines that the presence of cochlear implants increases the risk of bacterial infections that can cause meningitis in recipients.
The discovery increases the need to educate the public on the need for meningitis vaccinations in potential cochlear implant recipients.
The study involved making cochleostomy incisions (opening of the inner ear spaces of the cochlea the most important moment in the procedure) in the ears of 54 healthy rats, implanting cochlear devices in 36 of them, and then monitoring them for the presence of meningitis, a third of the rats with cochlear implants were stricken with meningitis. The study's authors found that in these cases, cochlear implantation lowers the threshold needed for pneumococcal baterial infection, the bacterium that causes meningitis.
Riding for Life
"Ride of Your Life," a new documentary film about Aspen snowboarder Chris Klug, is an unusual mix of elements. Klug describes the hour-long film as "part reality TV, part 'Jackass,' and part Warren Miller." And that probably leaves out the heart of the film - the impassioned promotional pitch on organ-donation awareness.
That combination of facets roughly reflects the rough, and ultimately triumphant path Klug has traveled. After being diagnosed in his 20s with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a disease of the bile duct, Klug spent seven years on the waiting list for a liver transplant. For three months of that wait, he was at the top of the list for an organ donation, due to his deteriorating condition. Klug underwent transplant surgery in July 27000; a year and a half later, he was on the podium in Salt Lake City, the bronze medal winner in the parallel giant slalom at the 2002 Olympics.
South Africa: The Thick End of the Wedge
BUSINESS Day's deputy editor ends her 14 years with the paper later this month, the last four spent, basically, doing my job. There's no worse place in a newspaper than the deputy editor's office. It's where all the bull, if not the buck, stops. It's where the bad news breaks as staffers queue up to complain about their pay, jobs, lives, their colleagues and their editor. It's where management reverse into with cost complaints because the editor is still at lunch, where the advert department slinks with another breathless request ("can we run the masthead in Nedcor's corporate colours when they announce their BEE deal, pleeease?") where the legal threats go and where the editor retires to complain about the pressure he's under. Robyn Chalmers has borne all these trials with biblical good grace these past four years.
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