A 14-year-old boy from Pakistan was transplanted with a heart that came all the way from Hyderabad at Frontier Lifeline Hospital, here on Tuesday.
According to K.M. Cherian, chairman and CEO of the hospital, the teenager had been admitted almost a month ago. “He had dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart muscles balloon out and become enlarged and so cannot pump efficiently,” he said.
Early on Wednesday morning, when they were alerted that a heart was available in Hyderabad from a patient declared brain dead at a hospital there, a team from Frontier Lifeline flew out to receive it around 5.30 a.m. The donor Vaishnav, 12, had been injured in a road accident, along with three other members of his family near Ramoji Film City.
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He had been admitted to Global Hospital in Hyderabad. To facilitate quick and easy transport of the donor heart, Hyderabad police created a green corridor from the hospital to the Shamshabad international airport.
Officials from state-run organ donation programme Jeevandan said that the donor heart reached Shamshabad in just over 35 minutes. “Our team got back to Chennai at 4.30 p.m. and the heart was brought from the airport to the hospital in about 10 minutes,” Dr. Cherian said.
According to an official of the Tamil Nadu cadaver transplant programme, none of the cardiac transplant centres in Chennai had an Indian patient who was a suitable recipient for the heart. “We also asked the Telangana government to check with other neighbouring states, including Kerala and Karnataka, to make sure there was no Indian patient in the vicinity who could have received it. If no Indian patient is found suitable, then the organ can be given to a foreign national, he said.
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The family lives in Dubai but is originally from Punjab in Pakistan. As of 9 p.m., the surgery was ongoing and the patient was responding well, a doctor said.
Vaishnav’s kidneys and liver were also harvested and sent to various hospitals for transplant surgeries.