Successful Surgeries Performed On Girl Without Anal Passage

Vivian Akua Aboagye Junior, a girl who was born two years ago without an anus (cloacol anomaly), can now attend to the call of nature, thanks to a team of medical doctors who performed successful surgical operations to correct the abnormality. The four-member team, led by Dr W. Appeadu-Mensah, a consultant paediatric surgeon and Head of the Paediatric Surgery Unit of the University of Ghana Medical School, performed three major surgical operations to keep the little girl alive. According to Dr Appeadu-Mensah, the specialist medical team performed the first operation on Vivian�s stomach to create an opening to enable her to attend to the call of nature when she was a baby. He said after the first operation at the KorleBu Teaching Hospital, the baby needed further investigations, estimated at GH�500, and two more surgeries at a cost of GH�5,000, bringing the total cost to GH�5,500. Dr Appeadu-Mensah stated that he and the girl�s mother, Madam Vivian Aboagye, made a passionate appeal through the Daily Graphic to the government, non-governmental organisations, well-to-do individuals and philanthropic bodies to assist the baby financially to undergo the two additional operations. He said two Tema-based businessmen, Messrs Kennedy Amoah-Gyimah and Charles Asare, responded to the appeal by contributing GH�5,500 to defray the medical expenses to pave the way for the operations. He said the medical team performed the second surgical operation on January 15, 2014 and discharged the patient after she had been admitted for two weeks, while the third operation took place on April 11, 2014, after which she was detained for a week. He said after the three successful operations, Vivian was now healthy and lives a normal life like any normal child. More specialist doctors needed Dr Appeadu-Mensah appealed to the government to train more specialist doctors and spread them across the regions and districts of the country, so that they could offer more specialist medical care to people across the length and breadth of the country. Throwing more light on the surgery, Madam Aboagye, a single parent and mother of four, recounted that no sooner had the girl�s father detected the defect on the girl at the Oda Government Hospital than he left for an unknown destination and nobody had heard from him since then. She said she single-handedly sent the baby to the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, where medical specialists performed the first surgical operation on her stomach to create a temporary opening for her to attend to the call of nature. Madam Aboagye was grateful to the team of specialist medical doctors who performed the successful operations; Messrs Amoah-Gyimah and Asare, the two Tema based donors, the Daily Graphic, Adom FM, Nana Kwame of Be Kind Enterprise and Mr F. Nkansah of Oda and some students in Accra who, in diverse ways, contributed immensely towards her daughter�s successful operations.