Kolkata, Nov 5 (PTI) Doctors at Kolkata Medical College and Hospital have successfully removed a magnet lodged in the right lung of a six-year-old boy using a specially designed magnet manufactured at a local workshop, after repeated attempts with conventional medical instruments failed, an official said on Thursday.
The child, identified as Arafat Ali and a resident of Baduria in North 24 Parganas, was brought to the hospital by his mother on Tuesday with complaints of persistent coughing and breathing difficulties.
A CT scan and an X-ray revealed that a small, amulet-shaped magnet had travelled through his airway and become lodged in the right bronchus, posing a serious threat to his life.
Doctors admitted him to the ENT department and stabilised his condition before attempting to retrieve the object through a bronchoscopy on Wednesday.
Associate Professor Dr Diptanshu Mukhopadhyay made four attempts to remove the magnet using forceps but failed. ENT department head Prof Soumendranath Bandyopadhyay subsequently took over the procedure, but his attempts were also unsuccessful.
"We could not get a proper grip on the magnet with the forceps. Every time we tried to pull it up towards the vocal cords, it slipped away," Mukhopadhyay said.
Doctors performed a tracheostomy to maintain the child's breathing and also attempted to remove the object through the alternative airway created by the procedure, but those efforts proved unsuccessful.
The ENT team subsequently explored the possibility of a thoracotomy, a surgical procedure involving an opening in the chest, and contacted SSKM Hospital for assistance. However, a paediatric intensive care unit bed could not be arranged there by Thursday morning.
With conventional approaches failing, doctors came up with the idea of using another magnet to retrieve the one lodged inside the child's lung.
Mukhopadhyay visited a lathe workshop in central Kolkata's Maniktala on Thursday morning and met worker Prabhakar Karar, showing him the child's X-ray images and explaining the medical challenge.
Karar, a resident of Shyampur in Howrah, examined the images and suggested that the lodged magnet was relatively weak, similar to those commonly used in toys. He offered to make a stronger, specially shaped magnet that could be attached to the tip of the surgical forceps.
"I was asked to make a powerful magnet of a particular size that could be attached to the forceps and taken close to the lodged object. I made it according to the doctor's specifications. I feel happy that something I made helped save a child's life," Karar said.
The custom-made magnet was brought to the hospital later in the day, and doctors immediately prepared for another attempt.
A six-member medical team led by Bandyopadhyay, with anaesthetists Debashis Ghosh and Atreyee Ghosh, and doctors Diptanshu Mukhopadhyay, Shubhrajeet Naskar and Udita Soren, conducted the procedure.
The specially designed magnet successfully attracted the foreign object, which had remained lodged in the child's lung for three days. Doctors used the tracheostomy opening to retrieve it, while ensuring that the object did not slip further into the respiratory tract.
Following the successful procedure, normal airflow was restored to both lungs, and the child was shifted to the intensive care unit for further treatment.
"It feels like we have won a battle. Air is now flowing through both his lungs, and he is recovering in the ICU," Mukhopadhyay said.
