A rare surgery at the KIMS Hospital, Hyderabad has brought relief to a 40-year-old patient suffering from cerebral palsy with quadriparesis with a hip fracture.

In the five-hour long surgery, Dr. Uday Krishna and his team have treated this patient with a total replacement that has helped him stand on his own. This is the fist time this patient has been able to stand on own since birth. The patient, Srisailam has been suffering from rare disorder cerebral palsy since birth.

Cerebral palsy refers to a group of neurological disorders that appear in infancy or early childhood and permanently affect body movement and muscle coordination cerebral palsy is caused by damage to or abnormalities inside the developing brain that disrupt the brain’s ability to control movement and maintain posture and balance

“Unfortunately my patient had all four limbs affected (quadriparesis) which itself is very disabling he has stiff or tight muscles and exaggerated reflexes of all four limbs (spasticity). His condition was so bad that he could not even pray to god holding the hands together. And due to the quadriparesis (weakness of all four limbs) he could not stand or sit and was confined to the bed,” said Dr. Udhay Krishna.

The patient visited Dr. Uday three years back when he suffered from a complex hip problem coupled with pain due to fracture three years back. He had over the last few years undergone multiple surgeries elsewhere to try and attempted to fix the fracture but failed due to the complexity of the fracture and spasticity of the hip. Earlier all attempts to do a total hip replacement had failed as it tends to dislocate automatically.

The complication was in fixing the painful hip and thereby making the hip stand as well. Dr. Udhay and his team had started the surgery of by meticulous planning since the cup (acetabulam) is completely deformed and the position of the cup should be accurate. Given this background, it took the team about 5 hours to complete this surgery successfully.

Once the surgery was successfully done, the patient was able to stand after 10 days with the help of a walker and may improve over the time. In future, the patient may require treatment in terms of getting injections or smaller surgeries to overcome the spasticity, said Dr. Uday.