14 DAY TRIAL // A baby boy who was born in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday has amazed doctors after surviving into his sixth day despite being born with his heart protruding from his chest.
24-year-old Priyanka Pal gave birth to her son at the government-run Sultanpur Hospital in Uttar Pradesh state. What was supposed to be the happiest day of her life turned into misery and despair, as the baby was born with his heart outside his body.
The extremely rare condition is known as ectopia cordis and has a reported incidence of 1:100000 births in developed countries. 90 percent of the babies born with this anomaly are either stillborn or die within the first three days.
However, the still-unnamed Indian baby has beaten odds of less than one in a million and is now into his sixth day, which means he urgently needs surgery and private healthcare. His only chance to survive is to undergo an expensive emergency surgery to put the heart back into the chest cage. That's why his poor and desperate parents are asking for financial help to save the life of their son.
“We were hoping that we would have a happy journey from here on but God had planned something else. We have been blessed with a son, but his life is in the balance,” the baby's father Nirbhay Pal said, according to Daily Mail.
None of the medical institutions in the area is able to perform the complex operation necessary to save the boy's life, so he urgently needs to be transferred to a better medical facility.
But given that his family is very poor and lives only on the father's income of less than £3 ($4.99 or €3.62) a day, it's practically impossible for them to afford to pay for private healthcare without help.
“The doctors said we should go to a private hospital and get surgery done. But I am a poor man. We can barely afford two square meals a day. I don't know what to do. We are hoping that the government will help us,” Nirbhay Pal added.
The cost of the operation has not been yet revealed, but the baby boy was moved from the Sultanpur facility to a hospital in the neighbouring city of Dehradun.
Ectopia cordis is a lethal congenital anomaly in which the heart forms outside the body, with very few reported survivors after surgical correction.