Ranti Abdallah, 43, spent Monday morning on a theatre bed to get treatment for uterine fibroids, woke up and left hospital in hours without bleeding or a single stitch. She’s become the first case study for uterine fibroid embolisation, a minimally invasive treatment for fibroids of the uterus, pioneered for Abuja at Cedar Crest Hospital.

Her surgeons didn’t cut into her; they simply punched a hole in her thigh, and inserted a micro-catheter into her femoral artery under the guide of an x-ray camera.

Dr Greg Ramjas is a UK-based interventional radiologist who guided inserted the micro-catheter, a thin, flexible tube, into Abdallah. Through it, he could inject a dye that stains her blood vessels so they show up as a map on the x-ray monitor beside her bed.At rapid exposures, the movement of the catheter is visible on the monitor.

The procedure on Monday morning involved him locating the special uterine artery that supplies blood to Abdallah’s uterus and the fibroids growing on it. The trick is to stop that supply by injecting embolic particles into the uterine artery. Normal bloodflow carries the particles to the end of the uterine artery. The particles in turn clog up that blood route, starving the fibroids of blood and nutrients, and causing them to shrink.

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