Good Samaritans pitch in for 1-year-old Ayat’s heart surgery in Delhi hospital

One-year-old Ayat Imtiyaz was operated at a Delhi hospital to fix her congenital heart condition, about three weeks after HT wrote about how her poor parents couldn’t afford the surgery.

Ayat was admitted on Wednesday at Max Hospital in Saket under Dr Kulbhushan S Dagar, director- neonatal & congenital heart surgery, who led the team that operated her on Thursday morning. The surgery went off well. She is recovering in the ICU.

A resident of a village in north Kashmir, Ayat Imtiyaz would not have lived long without the heart surgery as she suffered a critical heart disorder. However, her family of labourers could ill-afford her treatment.

Read more: Delayed surgery increases health risks for kids with congenital heart defects

“If the heart operation was not done, then my daughter wouldn’t have lived. Doctors say that with this operation done, she will have a normal life ahead,” said Ayat’s father Imtiyaz Ahmed Rah (36).

A Srinagar-based pediatric cardiologist treating Ayat, who did not want to be named for being a government servent, said, “She had a large hole in her heart that needed to be closed, as soon as possible.”

The doctor had also said that she was already a year old and if she was not operated upon before she completed two years, she could never be cured and her chances of survival would have dropped.”

Imtiyaz is a labourer who makes small wood products and earns around Rs 7000 per month. He was told that his daughter’s surgery would cost more than three lakh rupees.

Imtiyaz’s wife Saima (27), a homemaker, was also spending her days in great distress because the family wasn’t able to generate funds for teh treatment of the child.

The couple, married in 2012, and had their first child a year later. The baby was born with Down’s Syndrome and died after three months. They had their second child in December 2014 – a boy named Fazil – and Ayat was born on March 21 last year.

Luckily for Ayat, she found help in the form of Genesis Foundation, an NGO that works for getting such babies treated.

“After HT helped generate a part of the amount, we also picthed in and pooled in money through various CSR initiatives. Government hospitals have a long wait period for surgeries, and private hospitals most of these families cannot afford,” said R Srivatsan from the foundation.

The second child, four-year-old Manish Kumar, which also HT wrote about as he suffers from a similar heart condition, is being lined up for surgery next week.