Woman recovers after rare bone tumour treatment

Stating that there were several different bone tumours in her right heel bone (calcaneum), Dr Navin Gnanasekaran, head of the radiology department at Westminster Healthcare, Nungambakkam said, “The multiple tumours had to be destroyed while avoiding serious complications such as bone fractures, skin charring or blood vessel damage – and that too in a single sitting.” 

It was important to make the multifocal diagnosis because, if it were treated as unifocal (which was how it was treated before) – there would definitely be recurrence / persistence of pain, he added. “Multifocal osteoid osteoma of the bone is extremely rare, with only a handful of cases reported in the world. There were several tumours in her right calcaneum.” 

The medical team then decided to do a procedure called RF Ablation that involved just two small skin holes and no major cuts or surgery, on August 1. “In this threehour procedure which was technically difficult and challenging, we had to very carefully ablate the various tumours with the clinical outcome expected being that of pain relief. 

There were no complications, and after an hour of uneventful recovery, patient was discharged on the same day,” he added. Explaining her plight until she underwent this treatment, Iswarya said, “I had been suffering for the past 10 years. Many a time, I almost gave up and felt helpless when I used to get unbearable pain at nights. There has been no recurrent pain since the treatment. For the first time in 10 years, I slept peacefully for 10 hours together.”