PREPARATION IS VERY IMPORTANT
This cardiothoracic surgical vignette from Professor Adetayo Grillo will be of immense interest to readers of your journal. I thank the Professor for telling us his story from an original and personal perspective. I hope other pioneers with similar experience will contribute their stories to your journal for our benefit.
I remember that the Cardiothoracic Unit of the UCH Ibadan ably led by Professor Grillo in his heyday pre- sented their experience with open heart surgery at the Surgical Grand Round of our department in Paul Hendrickse Lecture Theatre in December 1978. Their story, quite rightly, was enthusiastically hailed as a truly momentous surgical milestone and the result of years of concentrated hard work and intense preparation by all those mentioned by Professor Grillo.
Before he joined in Ibadan, Dr. Adebonojo on a visit to Nigeria from the United States had told the Nige- rian of the feasibility of performing open heart sur- gery in Nigeria by Nigerian surgeons. After he took up his post in Ibadan, Adebonojo and Dr. Ayodele Falase of Department of Medicine carried out the first successful implantation of a permanent transvenous cardiac pacemaker in 1976 at UCH Ibadan. That procedure is now routinely performed at UCH Ibadan. Later that year, Grillo obtained the Fulbright Hayes Scholarship which enabled him to study cardiovascular diseases in the United States. He went to the Institute of Medical Sciences in San Fran- cisco, California to work from June to September 1977, on the growing frontiers of open heart surgery.
The Department of Surgery had facilitated the efforts of the cardiothoracic unit by helping to appoint two more lecturer-consultants to that unit and by provid- ing the facilities Grillo described during my headship and afterwards.
At the time of their remarkable surgical feat, the cardio- thoracic unit, like our then Orthopaedics and Trauma Unit each had 4 academics-cum-consultant staff and were on the brink of evolving into sub-departments preparatory to becoming full departments. Then, the virus of the economic doom and gloom described in Grillo’s story struck Nigeria, leading to the dispersal of UI/UCH doctors including myself to various pu- tative greener pastures.
It is worthy of note that all those listed by Professor Grillo (surgeons, physicians, anaesthetists, laboratory technologists and nursing staff) escaped to the Gulf for their economic survival. The only exception was Wole Adebo who instead disappeared from UCH Ibadan to the unknown and from the ken of his col- leagues as if he never existed.
Another interesting feature of Grillo’s story is that the surgeons Adebo and Brimmo, the cardiologist, Falase and the anaesthist Famewo were all classmates in Ibadan Medical School where they graduated with the MB BS in 1968.
Finally, I join Professor Grillo in wishing Professor Victor Adegboye, the current Head of Surgery and his team success in their on-going bid to sustain Open Heart Surgery in UCH, Ibadan.