In a rare instance of acute emergency quickly responded to by multiple agencies — wherein an organ was flown out of Chennai to a district — the liver of a 27-year-old man declared brain-dead following a road accident here was airlifted to Coimbatore and transplanted to a patient in the textile city on Sunday.
An IT company employee, who met with the accident on the Gemini flyover on Thursday, was admitted to the Royapettah Government Hospital from where he was shifted to the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (RGGGH) early on Friday. When on Saturday doctors declared that he had suffered irreparable brain damage, his mother, P. Vency, volunteered to donate her son’s organs.
The Tamil Nadu Cadaver Transplant Registry, which maintains records of patients needing organ transplants, allocated the liver to a patient at the Kovai Medical Center and Hospital (KMCH) in Coimbatore for transplantation. This is the first instance that an organ is sourced out of Chennai. “As the KMCH flagged an acute emergency we bypassed routine and circulated the clinical details of the patient with all the seven hospitals conducting liver transplant and had waitlisted patients. Once the other hospitals gave us their approval, we agreed to allow the KMCH to retrieve the organ. When a hospital flags an emergency, it will miss its turn in the next round,” said State transplant coordinator J. Amalorpavanathan.
The organ was retrieved by a team of specialists from the KMCH and transported from RGGGH through a ‘green corridor’ to Chennai airport in 15 minutes, while the flight to Coimbatore took another half an hour.
In a statement in Coimbatore, KMCH chairman Nalla G. Palaniswami said this was probably the first time an organ was being transported from Chennai to another city. Usually, organs are either harvested in other cities and sent to Chennai or are transplanted in the same city. This is the fifth liver transplantation at the KMCH in the past one-and-a-half months.
The other organs harvested from the brain-dead patient were allocated to various hospitals in Chennai.
