Foetal Feat

CARE FOR THE UNBORN GETS A BOOST, THANKS TO COMBINED EXPERTISE OF NEONATALOGISTS, PAEDIATRIC SURGEONS AND GENETICISTS

- Namita Kohli

Diwali arrived early for the Jains—Deepak and Soniya—of Baghpat district, Uttar Pradesh. Soniya recently gave birth to their second daughter, and their elder one just turned two. “We are excited to have a new visitor this Diwali,” says Deepak.

But things looked bleak for the Jains two years ago. Soniya was six months pregnant with twins then, and a routine checkup at a hospital in Meerut revealed that the babies were suffering from Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS), a rare and potentially fatal condition where one twin gets more blood than the other. The syndrome affects identical twins who share the same placenta. In TTTS, owing to a complication in the blood vessels between the two, one twin—the ‘recipient’—starts getting more blood than the other— the ‘donor’ twin.

This leads to more fluid at the recipient twin’s side, who is now at the risk of damage to the bladder (owing to increased urine) and heart. The donor, on the other hand, has less fluid, is dehydrated and has retarded growth.

Doctors in Uttar Pradesh had given up, recalls Deepak, who runs an oil business. “One of the doctors in Meerut had even told us that if you come for delivery here, you will go empty-handed [implying that doctors would not be able to save the mother or the two babies],” he says.

Then someone recommended Apollo hospital in Delhi, and the couple decided to give it a shot. “We were told that the mother and one of the babies would be saved. No one had given us this guarantee. So, we decided to go ahead with the procedure,” says Deepak.