For about four hours and forty-five minutes, a heart and lungs travelled – from a hospital in Kochi to the airport, on a chartered aircraft to Chennai and then raced through the city – to reach Fortis Malar Hospital in Adyar.
The organs then were transplanted on to a 24-year-old young man from Maharashtra, who is now doing well.
This is reportedly the first inter-State initiative by Kerala in sharing of organs.
According K. R. Balakrishnan, director, Cardiac Sciences, Fortis Malar Hospital, the recipient had come in about six months ago and was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, Eisenmenger Syndrome, a complication resulting from congenital heart defect that causes a hole in the heart increases lung pressure, leading to abnormal blood circulation.
“If he had been treated as a child, the hole could have been closed. But the increased pressure has led to irreversible changes in the lungs, making a heart-lung transplant the only option,” he said.
Long wait
It was a long wait as a lung is not easily available, said Dr. Balakrishnan. “In a lot of road traffic accident cases, the lungs too, are damaged,” he said.
Green corridor
When an alert came in from Kochi about 19-year-old Pranav H., who had been declared brain dead at Lakeshore Hospital and Research Centre, a team from Fortis Malar flew in on a commercial flight early on Tuesday morning. After the harvesting of organs, they left the hospital at 12.13 p.m., and, thanks to a green corridor set up by the Kochi police, reached Nedumbassery airport, 30 kilometres away at 12.42 p.m.
A chartered aircraft brought them back to Chennai by 2.10 p.m., and in just 10 minutes, once again thanks to a green corridor, at 2.20 p.m., they were at the hospital.
Except for the cornea, which was injured, all the other major vital organs of Pranav, who was from Kayamkulam, were given to patients at the top of the waiting list of the Kerala Network of Organ Sharing.
Two patients
Two patients with terminal diseases of the liver and kidney at the Lakeshore Hospital and one patient at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences waiting for a small intestine donor were provided with the organs, while one kidney went to a waiting patient in Kozhikode Medical College.
As an alert to the heart transplant centres in Kerala did not produce any recipient, Dr. Noble Gracious, the nodal officer for organ sharing of the Kerala Network of Organ Sharing, contacted the Tamil Nadu Organ Sharing Registry at about 10.30 p.m. on Monday.
Fortis Malar Hospital swung into action when they found they had a matching recipient. Heart-lung transplants are complicated and challenging procedures and not many are performed.
