Hale and hearty: Six months after the surgery, the baby is now healthy and his brain, heart, and other organs have developed normally.

A lump of mass that was pushing lungs, heart to one side removed from boy with a rare condition

A team of doctors carried out multiple interventions on a baby while he was in his mother’s womb, and after he was delivered, to remove a lump of mass that had grown inside his thoracic cavity and was causing cardiac failure. The four-cm growth had occupied more than half of the baby’s peach-sized thoracic cavity, thus pushing the lungs and heart to one side.

While babies born at 28 weeks of gestation have a survival rate of nearly 90%, in this case, the doctors were unsure about the condition the baby would be born in. “The baby had no cry after birth. We had to put a breathing tube and required high-frequency ventilation to manage him,” neonatologist Dr. Hari Balasubramanian said, adding the baby was born weighing 1.675 gram of which nearly 675 gram was the fluid accumulation.

On the eighth day after birth, the baby was taken in for a surgery to remove the unwanted growth. “The mass had taken up part of the blood supply. As we removed it, the baby’s ventilation improved as the lungs expanded considerably,” paediatric surgeon Dr. Jui Mandke said. Six months after the surgery, the baby is now healthy and his brain, heart, and other organs have developed normally. Doctors said in the medical literature, they could find only about 32 odd such cases, and preterm babies are even rarer.