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Tamil Nadu never learns its lessons right when it comes to performing stunts in the medical field. Remember the boy surgeon in Madurai who performed hysterectomy surgeries and landed first in a soup and then into jail? Well, Madurai is back in the news, this time for performing a record number of 14 breast cancer surgeries in 3.5 hours to enter into the Guinness Book of World Record! Do a back of the envelope calculation and one will land at a figure of 12 minutes per surgery!What is more shocking is that the surgeries were done in a government hospital, video taped and sent to the Guinness Book of World Record authorities without the State Government knowing anything about it.
A shocked, stunned and embarrassed state health ministry in Chennai has ordered a probe.
The surgeries were done by doctors at the Government Rajaji Hospital in Madurai.
At a press conference in Madurai, Rajaji hospital's head of oncology, Dr BKCR Mohan Prasad said he and his team comprising chief anaesthetist Dr R Chandrasekhar and surgeon Dr Gopinath had created a world record by operating non-stop on patients from 8.30am to noon on August 24. And then came a pat on the back: Hospital dean Dr S.M. Sivakumar proudly said that "nonstop lumpectomy on 14 women is a proof of the facilities available in the hospital".
And how did it all go? Here is Dr Prasad for you: "We opened four patients at one go. I would open the breast, remove the tumour and nodes and move on to the next patient. My assistant and a post-graduate student would close the wound. When I moved to the fourth patient, the first was ready to be sent to the recovery room and another patient would be wheeled in."
But hours later, stung by criticism, Dr Prasad did a somersault and said the team did not do the operations for the sake of setting a record.
"We have a large patient overload as I was on leave for 15 days. We decided to increase the number from the normal three to four surgeries a day to 14 in order to reduce the backlog. Later, when we looked up the internet, we realised that we were the first to do so many surgeries in so few hours. We then decided to send it to the Guinness Book of World Records through the government," he claimed.
Well, Prasad is not a one-off case in Tamil Nadu. Earlier, Coimbatore-based Dr C Palanivelu did 26 hernia operations in a day for a Guinness Book entry; Chennai-based Dr J. S. Rajkumar operated on 50 hernia patients in 24 hours in an attempt to enter the record books in 2006; Dr K Murugesan and Dr M. Gandhimathy allowed their 15-year-old son to perform a caesarean section in 2007.
