Woman walks properly first time in 53 years

Doctors in a city hospital have helped a woman walk straight for the first time at the age of 53 by conducting a total hip replacement surgery. The patient, Sita Sood, had fallen off her bed when she was six months old and had consequently suffered from a limp.

According to the doctors, the fall was so bad that Ms Sood had fractured her right femur (thigh bone which joins hip), which left her right lower limb shortened by some eight centimetres.

“The patient was given no surgical treatment at the young age, which proved disastrous. The injury caused severe dislocation in her right thighbone and resulted in the shortening of her limb by eight centimetres. This caused acute discomfort to the patient and left her limping the entire life,” said Dr Rakesh Mahajan, senior consultant, orthopaedics, joint reconstruction and spine surgery, at BLK Super Speciality Hospital.

For the doctors, it was a complicated case as initial diagnosis and X-ray of the patient showed a shallow acetabulum with dislocated hip and more than five centimetres cranial migration of head.

“This means that her hip was completely dislocated as the cup and ball socket was raised to 5 cm above, resulting in shortening of the leg muscle. It was very difficult to bring femoral head (highest part of the thigh bone) into its socket as the acetabulum (which joins head of femur with pelvis) was shallow,” added Dr Mahajan.

The doctors planned to reconstruct the acetabulum and do a femoral osteotomy (surgical cutting of bone to allow realignment). “We reconstructed the acetabulum with femoral head graft and did femoral osteotomy to reduce the head and finally cemented components were used to perform total hip replacement,” said Dr Mahajan.

For the surgery, muscle was opened layer-by-layer from all sides around the hip and released till the limb became of equal length.