A 14-year-old girl walked out of SMGS Hospital in Jammu six days after surgeons removed a tumour from one of her adrenal glands — and she did it without a large open incision, because the operation was done by keyhole surgery.
The reason this is worth your attention has less to do with one operation than with a calculation Jammu families make all the time: when something complicated goes wrong, do you stay, or do you set off for Chandigarh or Delhi?
The girl had come in with abdominal pain and loose stools. Imaging and clinical evaluation found a large tumour on an adrenal gland — the small hormone-producing glands that sit above the kidneys. The Department of Paediatric Surgery at SMGS, which is part of Government Medical College Jammu, removed it laparoscopically in an operation that took close to three hours.
Laparoscopic, or "keyhole," surgery works through a few small cuts rather than one long one, using a camera and fine instruments. For a patient it usually means less pain, a lower infection risk and a faster recovery than open surgery — which is borne out here: the girl was moved to the paediatric intensive care unit, then discharged on the sixth day after her operation, in good condition and on follow-up.
Why the team called it rare
The lead surgeon, Dr Saalim Nazki, said adrenal tumours of this kind are extremely rare in children — fewer than 10 such cases, he said, have been reported worldwide in patients under 16. That figure is his, as the operating surgeon, and we are reporting it as his statement rather than as an independently established fact.
Dr Nazki also made the point that these tumours are delicate to manage and demand careful surgical and anaesthetic planning to keep the risks down — which is really the whole story in one sentence. The headline is not the tumour. It is that the planning, the surgical skill and the anaesthetic cover to do this safely by keyhole were available in a government hospital in Jammu.
The operating team included Dr Akshat Sudhanshu, Dr Priyanka Koushal and Dr Kranti, with operation-theatre assistant Eric Teji, alongside the hospital's anaesthesia department.
What it does and doesn't mean for you
It does not mean every complex case can now be handled in Jammu; one operation does not make a rule. The tumour's size and its exact nature were not disclosed, so this is not a claim about a specific condition being routinely treatable here.
What it does mean is narrower and still worth knowing. The public paediatric surgery set-up in Jammu has the capacity to plan and carry out an advanced minimally invasive procedure — and to do it free at the point of care, which a private hospital in Chandigarh or Delhi would not. For a family weighing the cost, the travel and the disruption of going out of state with a sick teenager, that is a real data point, not a feel-good one.
It also sits alongside other recent movement at GMC Jammu, including its arrangement to run super-speciality clinics at District Hospital Reasi — the same institution steadily widening what it can do and where.
Sources: The Tribune; Daily Excelsior.
