Heart recipient off ventilator, say docs
Dilchand Singh, 39, who received a heart flown in from Bengaluru, was taken off ventilator on Tuesday after he showed sign of improvement, bringing smiles not only to the surgeons who performed the first transplant of eastern India, but also to the medical fraternity in general.
“Our transplant recipient is stable and continues to progress well. He is alert and has been taken off assisted ventilation. All medical parameters are satisfactory,” said the Arafat Faisal, medical superintendent of Fortis Hospital is a statement.
The relatives of the patient also visited him.
On Monday, the transplantation witnessed a seamless rare interstate collaboration involving an organ donor from Karnataka, surgeon from Chennai, a recipient from Jharkhand and a hospital in Kolkata.
After the flight from the Karnataka capital landed in the city, Kolkata and Bidhan Nagar Police created a green corridor between the city airport and the hospital in Salt Lake to cut down the transportation time.
The heart kept in a special case was taken to the hospital 18 km away in barely 22 minutes, a journey which usually takes 45 to 55 minutes depending on the traffic.
The surgery was conducted by KM Mandana and Tapas Roychowdhury.
The recipient was suffering from severe heart problem for many years and needed a transplant to survive. The hospital registered the request for a heart from a donor two years ago. The heart was donated by the family of an accident victim who was declared brain dead at a private hospital in Bengaluru. The patient’s heart was removed on Monday morning and taken to the airport.
In November 2016, a green corridor was created in Kolkata between SSKM Hospital in south Kolkata and a private hospital on E M Bypass in Salt Lake in the middle of the night for a patient, who needed a kidney transplant. The distance of 12.6 km was covered in 13 minutes.
Green corridors are traffic light free routes demarcated and cleared to transport harvested organs to ensure that it arrives at its destination in the shortest time possible.
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