No, Pak teen who won city’s heart didn’t jump queue for a transplant
CHENNAI: After 19-year-old Ayesha Rashan from Pakistan got a new lease of life with an Indian man’s heart after a successful transplant at a city hospital, it spread joy and hope about a better, less divisive tomorrow. But that warm glow was rather short-lived, as the girl, the hospital and even the State came under withering attack for not using the donor Indian organ on another Indian and instead using it on a foreigner, “that too a Pakistani!”.
So, did she ‘jump the queue’ as is being alleged by online tormentors? The short answer is ‘no’; she was on the waitlist for a heart transplant for more than five years.
It was in January that Ayesha Rashan underwent a heart transplant at a private hospital in Chennai. But this was not the first time the teenager from Karachi benefitted from the healthcare facilities the city boasts of.
In 2019, she was brought to Fortis Malar Hospital with complaints of breathlessness, vomiting and hypotension, and was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy. She required a heart transplant and was thus put on the organ recipient waitlist of the Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu.
However, while waiting for a suitable organ, Ayesha suffered a sudden cardiac arrest leading to heart failure. A team of doctors led by Dr KR Balakrishnan and Dr Suresh Rao KG, who were then with the Fortis, decided to do the best available option: undertake an emergency procedure to implant a temporary left ventricular assist device (LVAD).
It helped save her life, but it was temporary. Due to the uncertainty of a heart being available anytime soon, the doctors discussed the situation with her family and did another procedure to implant a device called a long-duration heartware ventricular device (HVAD), essentially a pump – the smallest in the world that would suit the girl who was all of 14 years then – to keep her heart pumping blood till an organ is available.
Ayesha’s and her family’s desperate wait for a matching heart came to an end after five years, and she underwent a transplant at MGM Healthcare in Chennai in January.
According to officials with the Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu, an organ is transplanted on a foreigner only if no national recipient can accept it.
Also, the waitlist and selection process is overseen by the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation or NOTTO, the national-level authority under the Directorate General of Health Services, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, which maintains the registry of organs and tissues, and coordinates and networks their procurement and distribution.
“There is no possibility of any violation. The organ allocation happens through NOTTO and the process is transparent. The organ is allocated to foreigners on the waitlist only if there is no ideal Indian recipient who can match the donor’s heart at that given time,” said Dr N Gopalakrishnan, member-secretary of Transplant Authority of Tamil Nadu.
On the allegations, experts said the preference is given to the local hospital first before the organ is offered to the hospitals in the south zone, South India in this case and then, to the rest of India. “The information is shared with all the hospitals in the country regarding the availability of the organ. There are many patients from other countries who stay on the waitlist. Why waste an organ? Only if it can’t be used on a patient because of low compatibility, it is allocated through the registry procedure through NOTTO for foreigners,” said Dr Suresh Rao, Co-Director, Institute of Heart and Lung Transplant & Mechanical Circulatory Support, MGM Healthcare.