Saving lives in sleepless nights

Mina Cheng
Associate Consultant (Surgery)
Queen Elizabeth Hospital

“When patient’s life is at risk, we are their sole reliance. No matter I am on call or not, I help out as much as possible to speed up the surgery and save patients’ lives,” says Dr Mina Cheng, a devoted trauma and vascular surgeon.

Earlier last year, Mina was in the middle of a 3-day course on advanced trauma life support in Shenzhen. On the first night, she received a call from a colleague telling her that a middle-aged patient with ischemic bowel required an urgent operation. It was a condition with a mortality rate of 70%. Without a second thought, Mina travelled back to Hong Kong and operated on the patient until early morning of the next day. After a short nap, she continued teaching in the mainland. Unfortunately, the patient later was complicated with splenic artery rupture and required another urgent operation. Again Mina returned to the hospital immediately to help though she was not on call. The patient was cured and has returned to normal life.

Being a surgeon can be taxing but Mina still does her best. She has a record of performing three operations a night with each lasted over three hours. “Some patients are pretty young. With proper treatment, we can save their future and their family!”

Mina promotes the development of trauma surgery, hoping that it can become a specialty in Hong Kong one day. She and her teammates initiated a ‘3-in-1 approach’ surgery for exsanguinating pelvic fracture in which three specialties work together in one hour to save patients by stopping the drawing of blood. An orthopaedic surgeon first applies external fixators to the pelvis to stop bleeding; then surgeon performs retroperitoneal pelvic packing; lastly, a radiologist performs embolisation to stop arterial bleeding. This surgery, which successfully reduces bleeding and lowers the mortality rate from 60% to 12.5%, was named ‘Hong Kong Protocol’ by fellow medics.