After eight failed surgeries, it was no less than a miracle when a 12-year-old's long-term ailment was finally cured through an operation performed by the doctors at the King George Medical University (KGMU) in Lucknow.

The 12-year-old from Uttar Pradesh's Hardoi district had been suffering from Hypospadias since birth and all of the family's attempts to get him treated at a super specialty hospital in Gurgaon ended in heartbreak.

What is Hypospadias?

According to Dr. Santosh Shukla, a Lucknow-based based paediatrician, hypospadias is a condition in boys where the urinary meatus is not at the tip of the penis. In simpler terms, it is a congenital condition where the urethral opening is displaced and is found along the middle of the penal shaft, the base or sometimes even within the scrotum, affecting form and function. Dr. Shukla says that this type of condition is found in 1 in 500 boys and is completely curable but only few doctors around the world are able to perform successful surgeries to correct this.

Surgeons have been correcting hypospadias since the late 1800s. More than 200 types of operations have been described but since the modern era of hypospadias reconstruction began in the 1980s, only a handful of techniques have been used by paediatric urologists. Surgeons prefer to do hypospadias surgery in full-term and otherwise healthy boys between the ages of 6 and 12 months but it can be fixed in children of any age and even in adults.

Professor S N Kureel has been performing this surgery since 2009 and has developed a single stage surgical technique, unlike the more common method where the defect-correction procedure is followed up with plastic surgery. He says, "Medical journals and records from across the globe shows that the surgeries performed to cure this problem have a 10-50 percent failure rate but I have a 100 percent success rate."

"In this particular case the patient underwent the first surgery in 2015, followed by seven more unsuccessful surgeries which cost the family more than Rs. 8 lakhs. The surgery at the KGMU cost him Rs. 50,000 and now the patient is doing very well. He has been discharged and is now leading a normal life," he says.

The senior paediatric surgeon further says that he has been training others to bring down the failure rates. "Presently, only two surgeons in the world are able to perform this surgery. I am trying to pass this technique on to others but the problem is that not every surgeon is able to pick it up. The precision level required is very high and surgeons across the globe often find it very difficult," he says. He has been visiting other institutions to train surgeons in this low-cost surgery, which can cure the birth defect in single stage and that too without resulting in many complications.

Deepak's father, on the condition of anonymity, says they had spent several lakhs of rupees trying to cure his son of this congenital defect. "We did everything to get this cured. We went to a very big and famous hospital in Gurgaon and the doctors there tried eight times but they were unsuccessful. Then someone recommended that we consult with Dr. S N Kureel from the KGMU. We thought of giving it a chance and he very successfully treated my child in just one operation," the father says.

"My child has suffered a lot due to this and we did not want him suffer any more. Dr. Kureel came into his life like a God and things are good now. My son is very fit and fine, living a healthy lifestyle and the treatment at KGMU cost us nothing when compared to the amount of money we spent at the private clinic in Gurgaon," the relieved father tells us.

The author Saurabh Sharma is a Lucknow-based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.