The Armed Forces organ donation initiative has been witnessing an upswing trend with two multiple organ donations having being successfully completed at the Army Hospital (R&R) this past month alone giving a second life to not one but seven persons.
In both the instances the families volunteered for organ donation.
One of the volunteer was Colonel Dod who passed away on March 22 due to intra-cerebral haemorrhage following which his family decided to donate his organs to save the lives of terminally-ill patients.
His heart was donated to a serving soldier with heart failure, his liver was transplanted to the father of a serving soldier suffering from end-stage liver failure whilst his kidneys were donated to two patients suffering from renal failure.
Likewise, the second volunteer was Havaldar Laxman Singh's 18-year-old son who passed away on March 27 due to an illness. As his family did not want their son's life to go in vain, they family volunteered to donate his liver to a serving soldier suffering from liver failure and his two kidneys to a soldier and the daughter of another soldier. Both these patients were battling with terminal renal failure and can now look forward to a new life.
According to the Army Hospital, the heart transplant was the third cardiac transplantation in the hospital and the number of liver transplantations too has risen to 41 including 29 transplants done through organ donation.
The organ donation initiative in the Armed Forces is three-year-old and is co-ordinated by the Armed Forces Organ Retrieval and Transplantation Authority.
The hospital attributed the success of its organ donation programme to the donor families and dubbed them as the “real heroes”.
