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Oxford surgeon who touched numerous lives remembered
View(s):He is no more but his memory and work will be etched forever not only in the hearts but also the minds of numerous doctors as well as patients.
He is none other than eminent Cardiothoracic Surgeon, the late Dr. Ravi Pillai, and the honour of delivering the inaugural ‘Ravi Pillai Memorial Oration’ aptly fell on senior-most Consultant in the field at the NHSL, Dr. Chandima Amarasena.
Dr. Pillai had facilitated the training of many at the Oxford Heart Centre, United Kingdom, where he worked for over 25 years and Dr. Amarasena had been one of them.
Dr. Chandima Amarasena delivering the oration
For Dr. Amarasena, Dr. Pillai had not only been his teacher and mentor, but also his friend. It was with much emotion that he looked at Dr. Pillai’s contribution to cardiac surgery in Sri Lanka, while giving a brief history of cardiac and thoracic surgery here, as well as some facets of Dr. Pillai’s professional and private life.
He recalled how in 2011, Dr. Pillai took early retirement from the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to settle down in Sri Lanka and try his hand at farming aloe vera in Jaffna for export, after joining an agricultural cooperative. A business journal had stated: ‘The Oxford Surgeon who became a Jaffna Farmer’.
Moving onto Dr. Pillai’s contribution to cardiac surgery in Sri Lanka through which he touched numerous lives, Dr. Amarasena says he personally trained five Sri Lankan post-graduate trainees at Oxford, the largest number by one surgeon. All five returned to Sri Lanka to serve their motherland and make important contributions such as launching the paediatric cardiac surgery programme; the Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG) surgery in the private sector and then the state sector and also the off-pump CABG; performing the first successful arterial switch operation; an aortic surgery programme to treat thoracic aortic aneurysms and aortic dissections and complex paediatric cardiac surgeries and valve repairs.
“Dr. Pillai’s last trainee was a leading member of the team which performed Sri Lanka’s first heart transplant at the Kandy Hospital and was directly involved in restarting heart surgery in Jaffna, assisting Dr. Pillai and performing surgeries himself,” he said, explaining that Dr. Pillai also helped in the foreign training of two others. They included a thoracic surgeon who, on his return, performed the first rib fixation surgeries for multiple fracture of ribs and introduced advanced video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) techniques.
Dr. Amarasena details how even amidst a flurry of lectures, training programmes and contributions to prestigious medical journals, Dr. Pillai also brought down three teams to perform complex adult and paediatric surgeries both at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka (NHSL) and the Sri Jayewardenepura General Hospital, personally funding most of the cost of these teams. He was also the first surgeon to perform homograft valve implants in Sri Lanka, four successful aortic valve repair (AVR) procedures after obtaining the valves from Oxford, meeting the cost himself.
He touched on Dr. Pillai’s “dream” to start cardiac surgery in Jaffna and how to this end he launched the charity, Oxonian Heart Foundation (OHF), with funds from the Pillai family, friends and the corporate sector, while actively doing the fund-raising.
Dr. Ravi Pillai
“With the wheels of bureaucracy turning slowly with regard to establishing cardiac surgery at the Jaffna Teaching Hospital, Dr. Pillai, never a man to let the grass grow under his feet, negotiated an agreement with the private Northern Central Hospital (NCH) to provide the building and staff, promising training and equipment through the OHF,” he said, adding that surgeries were performed at a subsidized cost. It had been a proud moment for Ravi when the first open heart surgery was performed at the NCH, followed soon after by the first valve replacements and first CABGs. This unit continues to function today.
He says Dr. Pillai’s work in the north extended beyond the operating theatre and the hospital to many free medical clinics for impoverished heart patients, while his pioneering efforts paid off elsewhere too when the Jaffna Teaching Hospital started its cardiac surgeries in 2017. To honour his contributions, the College of Surgeons of Sri Lanka awarded him an honorary fellowship.
Dr. Amarasena recalls the shock when Dr. Pillai passed away after a brief illness in 2018. But he has not been forgotten and the OHF – UK has decided to award fellowships for Sri Lankan cardiac surgical trainees, continuing his legacy.
Quoting the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe who famously said, “Honour is purchased by the deeds we do,” Dr. Amarasena winds up that “Dr. Pillai has done more than that”.
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