BarcelonaA year ago, four-year-old Sara’s parents saw with concern how, during a simple intervention at the dentist to treat a cavity, the anesthesia needle got stuck in her mouth. At that moment, at the dentist’s office in Barcelona’s Eixample where they were, several professionals tried to remove it, but the more they tried, the more it sank. Seeing that they could not solve it, one of the dentists decided to contact the head of maxillofacial surgery at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, Josep Rubio. This was the beginning of an unprecedented operation that ended with a happy ending; an intervention that has progressed The vanguard and has confirmed Hospital Sant Joan de Déu.
As the child’s family has explained, when Dr. Rubio received the call asking for advice on how to deal with Sara’s case, he was at a conference in Tenerife and the first thing he did was to recommend that the girl be taken to the hospital, where she was admitted. As soon as the head of maxillofacial surgery returned, the girl underwent an operation to try to remove the needle from her hand by Rubio himself and pediatric neurosurgeon José Hinojosa. Before starting the operation, and bearing in mind that the anesthesia needle is very small and thin, the doctors wanted to do a CT scan to make sure it was still inside the child’s mouth. None of the professionals had ever seen such a case, nor did they know how long it would take to extract it or if there was a risk of injuring an artery or a nerve during the operation.
The test found that the object had slipped through a small opening through which nerves and arteries pass and had become lodged under the right temporal lobe of the brain. After confirming the exact location of the needle, Rubio and Hinojosa decided to try to remove it by making an incision on the right side of Sara’s head, in a place where hair could hide the scar. Using a hybrid operating room, which allows for angiographies and angiotacs, and neuronavigation, the doctors located the needle where they expected and managed to extract it without causing any damage to the little girl’s brain. “It’s not usual to applaud in the operating room. It was the way to release the tension accumulated in a complex operation in which we did something we had never done and on which Sara’s future depended,” recalls Hinojosa in statements to The vanguard.
“Don’t stop taking the kids to the dentist”
After the intervention, Sara was admitted to Sant Joan de Déu for a week and had a good evolution. Now, a year later, the surgeons have considered that there are no sequelae left, with the exception of the scar. Faced with the unprecedented success of this exceptional case, the professionals presented it at the Congress of the Spanish Society of Scientific Neurosurgery last February. In addition, the doctors have written an article on the details of the unprecedented intervention and plan to publish it in a scientific journal soon.
“We want to emphasize that Sara’s case is not a reason to stop taking children to the dentist or to be afraid to put them under anesthesia when it is necessary to avoid pain,” insists Hinojosa. The lesson that can be drawn from it, according to the neurosurgeon, is that “in medical procedures sometimes unexpected things happen; the important thing is that we are prepared to solve them”.
2024-04-15 11:12:05
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