A one-year-old Tanzanian boy got a new lease of life after he was operated at a city hospital for a rare congenital heart disease, doctors said July 6.

Fravianous had no right lung and no blood vessel going to it. He only had a left lung and the left pulmonary artery arising from the aorta -- a condition called hemitruncus ('half-truncus'), they said. A normal heart has four chambers and four valves, where one blood vessel carries blood to the body and the other one to the lungs. "The patient also had a big hole in the heart," a doctor said.

A team of doctors at the Indraprashtha Apollo Hospital here recently operated on him for nearly 6-7 hours to treat him, a hospital spokesperson said. "They successfully performed the highly-complicated and critical surgery to save the life of the Tanzanian baby boy," she said.

Muthu Jothi, Senior Consultant-Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery Department, who was part of the team which operated on him, said, "When we first saw the patient we knew that this will be a high-risk surgery, but we decided to go ahead and operate as the child would not survive without the surgery." In order to treat the disorder, we first closed the hole in the boy's heart, he said.

"We detached the left lung blood vessel coming from the aorta and then between the left lung blood vessel and right side of the heart we engrafted a tube," Jothi said. The mother of the boy, said, "My son too got a new lease of life from a serious disease." "The patient needs to be on medication for some time and needs proper care as he just has one lung to perform all the functions," Jothi added.