The family of Neelakanta Sharma (46), a practising advocate at the Vanchiyoor district court here, who was declared brain-dead following brain aneurysm rupture at the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, did not need to be counselled about the compassionate gift of organ donation.
In fact, even in the midst of their grief, the family was insistent that Sharma would have wanted his organs to be donated and were only too willing to give the gift of life to faceless others.
In a true demonstration of how well-entrenched the concept of deceased donor organ donation has become in the State, the State machinery and the Kerala Network for Organ Sharing (KNOS), the nodal agency coordinating State government’s deceased donor organ donation programme (Mrithasanjeevani), worked in perfect coordination to ensure that the brain-dead patient’s heart was harvested and airlifted to an organ recipient 209 km away at Ernakulam in about 45 minutes.
The special arrangements for airlifting the precious organ from the SCTIMST to Lisie Hospital at Ernakulam came through following the intervention of Chief Minister Oommen Chandy.
“Transporting the heart by road was not an option because it would have taken too long. Also, the transplant surgeon himself was doing the retrieval. The team travelling back and forth and then having to perform a difficult, long surgery was not possible. We contacted the CM, who solved the issue immediately by arranging a six-seater aircraft of the Navy for transporting the harvesting team to the capital,” Noble Gracious, nodal officer, KNOS, said.
The four-member team led by the renowned cardiac transplant surgeon at Lisie Hospital, Jose Chacko Periappuram, reached SCTIMST on Friday evening and flew back with the heart in a special aircraft of the Air Force at around 6.50 p.m.
Sharma had been admitted to the Neuro ICU at SCTIMST on July 6, following a brain aneurysm bleed and had remained there since in a critical condition. On Thursday afternoon, after he was declared brain-dead, the doctors broached the prospect of organ donation with the family.
Doctors, to their surprise, found that the family was very particular that organ donation had to go through, which made the rest of the processes easier for KNOS.
The matching (blood group) recipient for the heart was found in a 47-year-old patient with failing heart following cardiomyopathy, who has been quite sick and waiting for a heart for the past six months, at Lisie Hospital. Both kidneys and corneas were also harvested, while the liver was not found to be viable.
The body was handed over to the family after organ retrieval on Friday night itself.