Surgery in a blackout: The doctor healing children's broken hearts

From CNN (Cable News Network), USA
By Teo Kermeliotis and Sara Sidner

The masked man had already cut her chest open when the lights went off, plunging the entire room into darkness.

This was not good. In fact, it was downright dangerous. A power outage is probably the last thing anyone would want to happen midway through surgery, let alone while performing the delicate task of closing a hole inside the heart of a six-year-old girl.

But Dr Godwin Godfrey and his team had come prepared.

"We knew that we always have power cuts in the hospital - they can happen at any time, even at night - so we had prepared a back-up manual handle that we could use to run the pump by hand," says Godfrey, who works at the Bugando Medical Center in Mwanza, north Tanzania.

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