Aditi Gilbile, a four-month-old baby from Solapur, has survived more than 20 heart attacks over two months before undergoing a cardiac surgery in a Mumbai hospital. Now the child is recovering fast, and according to doctors, she will lead a normal life after eight/nine months.
The infant was diagnosed with a rare congenital malfunction, Anomalous Left Coronary Artery from Pulmonary Artery (ALCAPA), a rare occurrence in children. Aditi started showing signs of the ailment in January, when she was two- month-old. Her mother, Preeti, said she started being irritable, and her breathing and feeding pattern underwent a change. “She would sweat profusely and refused to breastfeed. We rushed her to a doctor the day she cried incessantly for three hours,” said her mother. A doctor in Barshi taluka, where the family resides, identified that the problem was due to heart ailment. He referred the child to Pune, where Aditi was diagnosed with ALCAPA. Her parents then approached the HN Reliance Hospital in Mumbai, where the child was operated on February 21.
“In normal babies, the pressure in the lungs normalises within a week of birth. In Aditi's case, the pure blood was flowing away from the heart. It resulted in frequent and silent heart attacks that damaged heart muscles,” said Dr Shivaprakash, head of the paediatric heart centre.
