It took five surgeries for Murthy to create the ears and implant them on the boy.
By Raghavendra M
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An 8-year-old boy from North Canton who was suffering from a rare birth defect received a pair of new ears thanks to a miraculous surgery done by an Indian American surgeon.
Dr. Ananth Murthy, director of plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Akron Children’s Hospital, performed a successful surgery on Elijah Bell, a student at the Frazer Elementary in Stark county, Ohio. Bell can hear now normally with using a bone-anchored hearing aid, reported Canton Representative.
Bell was born with bilateral atresia microtia, a defect which left him without ears or ear canals. So he was given bone-anchored hearing aid, which helped him hear normally. However, he wanted normal outer ears like others.
When the case came to him, Dr Murthy decided to build new ears for Bell and started building new ears using the boy’s rib cartilage. During that time, Bell was just 4 year old. It took five surgeries for Murthy to create the ears and implant them on the boy. The last surgery was done in July when Bell got the “hills and valleys” for his ears.
“It is an artistic procedure,” said Murthy. “The body naturally wants to smooth everything out as it heals, so we always have to go back a couple of times to help create the natural curves of an ear,” the Indian American doctor added.
Expressing her excitement over her son getting a pair of new ears, the boy’s mother Colleen Bell said that the confidence he got out of this new look is “going to translate into his education, it’s going to translate into his friendships with others, how he works with teachers, all those things”.
Dr Murthy, who is lauded across the US for his “miraculous” surgery, did his undergraduate degree at the age of 19 and earned his medical degree at 22.