The Blue Girl

Abstract

[first paragraph of article]

Memories of my early years of establishing cardiology service from scratch in Qatar are still fresh and clear in my mind. Some cases are hard to forget because of the interesting social and human elements surrounding them. One such case was that of an Egyptian girl whose fate brought her to Qatar over 30 years ago because of cyanosis.
In June 1980, our cardiology section in Rumailah Hospital was two years old. By that time, we had acquired electrocardiography, phonocardiography, and M-mode echocardiography machines. We did not have a proper catheterization laboratory but we managed to do right and left heart catheterization in a room in the coronary care unit (CCU), using a CCU monitor and a small portable fluoroscopy machine attached to a video recorder. We used a portable x-ray machine to record one image at a time on a film to clarify or document a lesion of a coronary vessel by injecting a contrast agent, then quickly shoot a picture. We may have had to repeat such shooting because it gave us better images than our primitive video recorder. With this technique we were able to make a reasonable diagnosis for most adult cases.