Stroke victim stunned doctors who discovered she had a back-to-front heart

A 28-year-old stroke victim stunned doctors who discovered she had a back-to-front heart, it has emerged.

Anita Gurung, from Reading, underwent pioneering surgery involving her brain being chilled to correct her rare condition.

Professor Stephen Westaby, who carried out the operation at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, told: "I'd never seen this problem in 30 years of cardiac surgery, and neither had any of my cardiological colleagues.

"It's a very dangerous situation where blood from the body can get directly into the brain without any sort of filter - the filter is usually the lungs. So she was destined for an early, devastating stoke."

Doctors used drugs to stop the heart, then drained all the blood from her body and packed her head in ice keeping her head at around 17C, allowing them only 30 minutes to reconnect her major blood vessels.

Doctors were only alerted to Mrs Gurung's condition when she suffered a stroke in September last year.

The patient's main blood vessels into her heart were connected the wrong way around, meaning she could suffer another stroke at any time.

The main vein that drains deoxygenated blood from the top half of her body was connected to the left collecting chamber of the heart instead of the right, meaning blood was being pumped out directly to the rest of her body, including her brain, without going via the lungs first.

This meant that her blood was not properly oxygenated or going through the usual filtering processes that take place around the lungs.

Debris and air bubbles in the blood coming back from the top half of her body were being pumped up to her brain, meaning that since birth she has been at constant risk of a clot or blockage in the blood vessels of her brain.