Donor heart flown in from Tiruchi to Hyderabad

The donor heart is from a 23-year-old youngster from Tiruchi, Sarvanan, who had received fatal injuries in a road accident on November 23 and was declared brain-dead.– Photo: By Arrangement

The next 72 hours would be crucial for the family of Ch. Srinivasa Raju, who received a donor heart that was flown all the way from Cether Hospital, Tiruchi in Tamil Nadu.

As his family – wife and two children – was waiting with bated breath for some encouraging news, the heart transplant surgeons of Yashoda Hospitals, Secunderabad on Saturday evening were engrossed in a marathon eight-hour non-stop surgery to transplant the donor heart and in the process give a fresh lease of life to Srinivasa Raju. The donor heart was from a 23-year-old youngster from Tiruchi, Sarvanan, who had received fatal injuries in a road accident on November 23 and was declared brain-dead in the late hours of Friday, November 27 by doctors at Cether Hospital. The news of availability of a donor heart came to the officials of Jeevandan, the organ donation scheme of Telangana State, in the early hours of Saturday.

The news about the availability of a donor heart set in motion a series of events that eventually made the hospital’s Heart Transplant Surgeon, A.G.K. Gokhale board a chartered flight to Cether Hospital in Tiruchi from old Begumpet airport at around 10.30 a.m. on Saturday. By 4.30 p.m., the transplant surgeon was back with the donor heart.

Thanks to the green channel provided by Hyderabad traffic police, within three minutes, the donor heart reached the hospital in Secunderabad and transplantation surgery went under way exactly at 5 p.m.

This is the second time that a donor heart was specially flown-in in a chartered flight by Yashoda Hospitals.

This is the second time that a donor heart was specially flown-in in a chartered flight by Yashoda Hospital