City makes way for Green Corridor, yet again

In another inter-State effort at saving lives, the heart of a 30-year-old construction supervisor from Bengaluru has saved the life of a woman in Secunderabad, Telangana.

The donor, Pandit Shivaraya Baje, hailing from a village near Sholapur, met with an accident near Electronics City on Thursday. A 15-km Green Corridor was created to transport his heart from PMSSY Hospital located on Victoria Hospital campus, to HAL Airport on Old Airport Road. It took 11 minutes 33 seconds for the live heart to reach the airport from where it was airlifted to Yashoda Hospitals in Secunderabad.

This is the twelfth donation in the city this year and the third from PMSSY Hospital.

Nagesh N.S., head of the transplant team at PMSSY Hospital, told

The Hindu that the donor was first admitted to Fortis Hospital on Bannerghatta Road and was later shifted to PMSSY after doctors declared him brain-dead on Friday. The second determination of brain death was done at PMSSY Hospital on Saturday.

The Zonal Coordination Committee of Karnataka for Transplantation (ZCCK), the nodal agency for facilitating organ transplants in the State, finalised the list of recipients. At 1.13 p.m. on Saturday, the chartered flight from Bengaluru carrying the live donor heart landed at Begumpet airport. The alert traffic and security officials of Hyderabad made sure that the bustling Begumpet-Paradise main road was empty. The ambulance with the donor heart and the doctors cruised at high speeds and in 2.45 minutes reached Yashoda Hospitals.

By 1.30 p.m., the live heart was safely in the operation theatre and by 6.30 p.m. the transplant surgery was completed.Apart from the heart, the liver was donated to a patient in HCG hospital in Sampangiramanagar in the city. While one kidney was transplanted in a patient in the State-run Institute of Nephrology on Victoria Hospital campus, the other went to St. John’s Medical College and Hospital here. The corneas were donated to Lions Eye Bank in the city.