A 50-year-old woman from Myanmar received a new lease of life after undergoing a surgery at a private facility here that allowed her to regain her ability to speak and breathe properly, the hospital authorities said on January 18.

The woman had come to India recently to donate a kidney to one of her relatives and on preparing her for the transplant, doctors had found that she experienced discomfort in breathing "due to a tracheostomy tube in her neck", they said. She had lost her ability to speak due to bilateral vocal cord palsy after undergoing a thyroid surgery in her home country a few years ago. She had an artificially inserted tube in her neck called tracheostomy, due to which she had discomfort in breathing naturally and was unable to speak, the Apollo hospital said in a statement.

She came to India with a noble cause of donating her kidney to a relative in need. At the hospital, she was being prepared for the transplant when experts also advised her to undergo surgical intervention so that her neck tube could be removed, it said. Under the supervision of Dr Sandeep Guleria, senior consultant surgeon in general surgery, GI surgery and transplantation, and Dr Noor Ul Din Malik, consultant ENT, head and neck robotic surgery at the hospital, she "underwent both the surgeries in a single stage with an uneventful recovery".

Based upon her condition, she was advised to undergo "laser cordectomy along with donor nephrectomy (surgery for kidney donation)", the hospital authorities said, adding that the surgery took place in November. Laser cordectomy was planned to remove her tracheostomy tube from her neck (decannulation) and treat her artificial breathing, they said.

On the patient's recovery, Dr Guleria said, "As we had planned, the patient underwent both the procedures together and was decannulated after three weeks of the laser cordectomy procedure. She has been doing great since then, having an uneventful recovery, and she has been able to talk and breathe naturally."