Dr. Le Ngoc Thanh, Deputy Director of Hospital E in Hanoi and chief of it’s Cardiovascular Centre, announced on April 4 that it had successfully conducted an operation on a rare heart malformation case.
Just 16-years-old, Hoang Thi Xuyen from the northern province of Bac Kan was suffering with a strange and rare heart ailment, in which the blood flowed from the vena cava to the left side of her heart, instead of the right side, and then to her lungs before flowing back to the left side as it normally does.
As a result, both the right atrium and the right ventricle of her heart have atrophied gradually to the size of merely one-tenth of the left side at the moment. They could not even be seen in an X-ray.
After a 4-hour operation, doctors at the Cardiovascular Centre were able to move the vena cava from the left to the right side of her heart and connect it with her right atrium, along with plastic surgery to turn the atrium back to its normal size.
At present, Xuyen is recuperating with her arterial oxygen saturation level reaching 98-100 per cent, the same as that of a healthy person.
