CHENNAI: Seventeen-year-old Raghuveer Soni is one in a million. But he’s far from lucky. Soni, a high school student, was diagnosed with a rare condition where he had three cardiovascular blocks in the blood vessels in his heart and required a complex surgery - Triple Vessel Angioplasty to live. “When we checked his cholesterol, it was exceptionally high. And then the complaints of chest pain after mild exertion came out,” explains Dr Sanjiv Agrawal, Senior Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at Fortis Malar Hospital. Ironically, as his condition had been worsening over the last six months, his family doctor apparently misdiagnosed it as gastritis.When his condition finally became intolerable, doctors at the multi-speciality hospital ran him through an ECHO and a Coronary Angiogram (CAG). “It was very unusual for a boy at his age to get so many blockages and so we had to treat carefully,” adds the cardiologist. While most people would have opted for a bypass graft by default, Dr Agrawal and team opted for the complex multivessel angioplasty. This effectively meant that instead of having his chest cut open, the entire stent procedure was done through a miniscule 2 mm hole in the boys side.The five stents that had to be implanted manually comprised three in the right coronary, one in the circumflex and one in the LAD. “Through the 90-minute surgery, he was anaesthetised but awake as we wrapped up without any complications,” adds Agrawal. The best part about the procedure was that four days after the surgery, he actually recovered well enough to return to school; which would have been impossible with a bypass.
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