Photos: Boy with upside down head gets life-changing surgery

A 13-year-old boy who was left an outcast in his village in India because his head hung upside down has risked life changing surgery to straighten his neck, it has been reported.



The boy, Mahendra Ahirwar, suffered from a rare condition called congenital myopathy which made the muscles in his neck so weak that his head would hang at a 180-degree angle.

The boy’s parents are said to have spent years taking him to see doctors, but a solution could not be found to his condition.

Mahendra Ahirwar’s condition is said to have been so problematic that he had to rely on his mother to feed him, bathe him and dress him.

The condition also prevented him from going to school.

That is set to change, however, after  Julie Jones, a mother of two based in Liverpool, UK, heard about his plight and set up a crowd-funding page, which raised £12,000 for his treatment.

The teenager has now undergone life-changing surgery by a former NHS surgeon, Dr Rajagopalan Krishnan, from Apollo Hospital, in Delhi.

In the surgery, which is said to have taken 10 hours, Dr Krishnan and his team opened up the front part of his neck – leaving the front of his cervical spine completely exposed – because of his extraordinarily thin skin.

They then removed the disks from his neck, and replaced them with bone graft from his pelvis and then fitted a metal plate to secure the neck straight.

Julie Jones, who facilitated the surgery, reportedly said that she was moved after reading Mahendra Ahirwar’s tragic plight that she decided to help.

‘It was tragic. All I could think about was my own son and how I’d feel if he was in that situation,’ she said, according to the report.