Nigerian baby wins battle for survival in Pune

Barely a month old, baby Chemeire, born to Nigerian parents Victoria and Callistus Ibewuike, has already fought a long battle for survival.

The baby girl, born on January 22 in a hospital in Nigeria’s Imo state, was born with a serious problem. Her oesophagus or food pipe as we commonly know was not developed, a condition known as oesophagus atresia.

Her mother, Victoria, 33, was the first to notice that her newborn was making an abnormal gurgling sound which didn’t sound ‘right’. “This is my fifth child. So, I have fairly good experience with children. This baby was special as I have four girls and I had planned for a fifth child as I wanted a boy. But it is God’s wish that I got a fifth girl, she is welcome,” Victoria said.

“I had been told that I have twin children on ultrasound, but the other baby was lost and only one was delivered. It is a case of vanishing twin, that’s why also she is special as she is a fighter,” said Victoria, a communications engineer by profession. However, the special child started choking up within a few minutes of birth making Victoria sceptical.

“My husband called his surgeon friend who checked her and told us about her missing oesphagus. We started looking for hospitals there but weren’t satisfied with the arrangements. They said it would take up to a year for rehabilitation of the child,” she said.

Though a rare condition affecting about one in 3,000 children born, the surgery for the same is fairly common and accepted in India. Chemeire’s father, himself a renowned radiologist in Imo, spoke to doctors at Pune’s Jehangir hospital on a friend’s suggestion.

“The child’s food pipe was divided into two parts, one of which was totally blocked. This was preventing the saliva from going down into the stomach. Instead, it was accumulating in the mouth and then getting aspirated into the wind-pipe, choking the child and also leading to pneumonia,” said Dr Dasmit Singh of the Jehangir Hospital.

“To make matters worse, the lower pouch of the food pipe was attached to the wind-pipe, causing a very severe swelling of the lungs,” Dr Singh said. He added that the defect if not corrected early, the lung could collapse even leading to death. The Ibewuike couple then decided to transfer the baby from Nigeria to Pune. “She was completely dehydrated. Her platelet count was very low and kidneys had failed with less than half the capacity of the kidneys left. We took four days to prepare her for surgery,” said neonatologist, Dr Anshu Sethi.

The surgery was performed when Chemeire was 14 days old. She had breathing problems post operation and was put on a ventilator for two days. After eight days of surgery, a dye study done to test whether the food pipe had healed adequately, showed that the healing was good, signaling that the child would finally be able to feed orally like a normal child. On Tuesday as Victoria was taking discharge from the hospital, her joy knew no bounds.