The Palestinian Center for Pediatric Cardiac Surgery at Al-Makassed Hospital in Jerusalem continues to perform qualitative and delicate operations with great success. During the current week, the center's teams performed a delicate operation on a two-week-old baby girl to remove a cancerous tumor from the heart.

The newborn who underwent the operation weighed only 3 kg, while the phenomenon of children being born with cancerous tumors in the heart is a rare genetic mutation, with a rate of 1 in every 250,000 newborns.

Regarding the operation, Dr. Nizar Hajjah, a specialist and head of the Pediatric Cardiac Surgery Center, says that the size of the tumor that was removed was the size of the heart chambers, and it is the largest cancerous tumor to be removed from a child's heart at Al-Makassed Hospital so far. It was removed, the heart wall was separated from the tumor, and it was removed from its roots, and the valve damaged by the tumor was repaired.

Dr. The argument that the cancerous tumor in the heart causes problems in the blood flow process and the performance of the heart functions, and also causes severe difficulty in breathing and an increase in the heart rate in the child, noting that about 90% of primary heart tumors in children are benign tumors.

Dr. Hajja explains that the operation, which took 3 hours, included the removal of one of the three heart cusps from the valve, explaining that the child is now in a stable condition and recovering well, after staying in the intensive care unit for pediatric heart surgery for 3 days.

The child's mother explains that the tumor in her child's heart was not discovered until the end of the ninth month of pregnancy, and says: The news was shocking and surprising to me, and I was worried and afraid that my child would be exposed to surgery at this age, but thank God my child is now in good health and is drinking milk through breastfeeding.

The Palestinian Center for Pediatric Cardiac Surgery in Al-Makassed is the largest center in the Middle East, with distinguished human capabilities and high readiness, as it receives all types of congenital deformities and heart diseases; Which are classified into 47 globally known diseases, including hypoplastic left heart syndrome, right heart conditions, treatment of holes in the heart or one of its parts, in addition to operations to remove cancerous tumors from the heart.

The center contains 16 beds for pediatric cardiac resuscitation distributed over two units, in addition to the isolation unit that includes two beds, while the center annually performs more than 400 surgical operations, and 400 therapeutic and diagnostic catheterizations in an effort to cover the needs of Palestinian children with heart disease and congenital deformities in all cities and governorates.