US doctor saves life of child in Russia with complex heart problem
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Dr. William Novick travels across the globe to save children with congenital heart defects and believes in miracles happening in operating rooms.
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Dr. William Novick
Miracles can happen and sometimes they do during very complicated medical procedures while in the operating room, US pediatric cardiac surgeon William Novick, told Sputnik.
“Do I believe in miracles in the operating room? You know, I have actually seen miracles in the operating room. So, I guess the answer is yes,” Novick said.
The surgeon operates on complex heart problems in kids, coaches US doctors, and establishes medical programs in countries of low income and in "hot spots" around the globe where medical help is urgently needed.
He told about his experience of conducting surgery on a patient in a foreign country, where according to him, if the medical procedure was not performed in time, the child would have died within a week or two.
"So, it is a miracle that we and the child got each other at the same time,” he said.
The surgeon was asked to share the most "miraculous" cases in his journey, so he recalled a particular surgery in Russia, where the hospital already had its own pediatric heart surgery practice but needed assistance in operating on complex cases and on newborns.
“So, we make this trip and as they are going over the cases, we see that this particular child needs re-operation. They did an operation two-three years before and now the child has big problems and needs to be operated on again,” Novick said.
Novick explained that the patient’s mother wanted him to conduct the surgery, but the local doctors said they wanted him to sit nearby during the operation as they have enough experience in doing such procedures.
“I was there when my colleague ran into the room and shouted, 'Come now! There is blood everywhere!'” he said.
Novick saw the blood really everywhere, on the floor, the ceiling, and on the anesthesia curtain.
“The surgeon was covered in blood. I looked at the monitor and there was no EKG, no electrical activity by the heart. Also, there was no blood pressure,” he said.
He began operating immediately and told the local surgeon how he was going to fix it.
“I am going to do a bypass and fix this. Watch me,” he said. “We get to get on a bypass and we start the procedure of cooling the patient down immediately to protect the brain from the blood not flowing to the brain for - are you ready? - seven minutes. Seven minutes!” he said.
Novick noted that when the patient's condition allowed it, the attending physicians began to re-warm his body step by step and give him additional medication to protect his brain. The baby was transferred from the operating room in a stable condition an hour later to the intensive care unit.
The next morning before going to the airport, the surgeon said he came to the hospital to make sure the baby was doing well. Days later, he received a message that the patient was going back to normal.
“I exclaimed: “Oh my God, I can't believe this.”
Novick's team went back several months later to the same city, and the baby's mother insisted that Novick make the first and last incisions in the upcoming surgery.
“So, we did that. It was a miracle. This is a miracle child,” he said.
The baby is now doing well, Novick tells, and the surgery solved the underlying medical problem.
“We are not God, we are not perfect and need to adjust our psychology and our minds to the fact that we need to operate again on some kids," he said.
In 1994, surgeons in Kiev contacted Novick to tell him they could not normally operate on children with ventricular septal defect or VSD and pulmonary hypertension. However, he promised to ponder on the problem and came back with a strategy 12 months later.
“We operated on this girl in May 1996 and now she sends me this picture. She is now 26! She was denied surgery in Kiev in 1995, but I came in 1996 with this idea and said: 'OK, we will try a couple of things,'” Novick said.
During the trip, Novick and his team operated on two complex patients and both of them are fine now.
“When other people say 'Oh, no, you can't operate on this child,' but you do that and 26 years later you get a photo of a young woman with a normal pulmonary artery pressure when nobody wanted to operate on her - that is a miracle,” Novick added.
