MUMBAI: When 44-year-old Pramila Shinde, wife of a BEST employee from Lower Parel, was diagnosed with oral cancer in December 2014, the treatment seemed as scary to her as Big C itself. Apart from radiation therapy, doctors would have to remove the front portion of her tongue along with the floor of her mouth. Questions of how she would look and how she would manage the daily mundane stuff—speak to her husband, roll food in the mouth or distinguish the sour taste from bitter—worried her.

When Roshan Ali, a 30-year-old call centre employee, fell from a local train between Dahisar and Borivli stations in 2008, he lost his right arm and four fingers of his left hand too. "Life was difficult for a couple of years," recalled Roshan who could not eat or button up shirts on his own.

Help for both Pramila (not her real name) and Roshan came from an unexpected quarter: The tribe of plastic surgeons who are usually better known for tummy tucks, hair transplant and facelifts that enhance people’s looks. While Pramila’s tongue and mouth were reconstructed by plastic surgeons in Tata Memorial Hospital, Parel, Roshan got two 'fingers' due to a two-year-long effort by plastic surgeons of BMC-run Nair Hospital in Mumbai Central.

At a time when plastic surgery has become synonymous with cosmetic surgery, plastic surgeons came together to celebrate the country's second National Plastic Surgery Day on July 15.

"At present, people associate plastic surgery with cosmetic surgery but we do so much more. We need to inform the general public about our work," said Dr Ravin Thatte, a senior plastic surgeon who has been a teacher to most plastic surgeons here. "We are 'generalists' who can mend broken jaws and reconstruct nerves with equal ease," he said.

Dr Amresh Baliarsingh, who heads the plastic surgery department in Nair Hospital and operated on Ali, said plastic surgeons "reconstruct" lives. "Our job is to ensure that a patient who has got deformed due to an accident or a disease, can take care of him/herself,'' said Dr Baliarsingh, who used two digits from Ali's left feet to give him functional 'fingers'. He even connected blood vessels on Ali's new fingers to the blood vessels on his forearm to ensure better sensory function.

Most plastic surgeons depend on cosmetic surgery:

Plastic surgeons form a small chunk of the medical field. Barely 3,000 of them practise in India and a majority of them have to depend on cosmetic surgery to earn decently. Plastic surgery departments in public hospitals still focus on reconstruction, but experts like Dr Thatte rue that cosmetic surgery has overshadowed their expertise. "Bariatic or weight-loss surgery has emerged as a big surgery in the US, but it has spun out a new sub-specialty for cosmetic surgeons as people need their help for sagging skin," he said. Yet, a survey carried out in the US in 2004 showed that patients have more faith in the doctor identified as plastic surgeon than a cosmetic surgeon.

"Plastic surgery isn't easy. Plastic surgeons work on reconstructing a jaw for over four hours when the cancer removal surgery takes barely a fourth of the time," said Dr Prabha Yadav who heads the plastic surgery department of Tata Memorial Hospital, Parel. Her department, with 12 doctors and students, performs over 600 flap operations with 95.5% success. "Even if the patient's tongue or bones are removed, we help them talk," she added. Pramila is a live testimony of this.