Heart moves from Bangalore to Chennai in 120 minutes FIRST INTERSTATE TRANSPLANT; DOCS, COPS ACROSS BORDERS WORK TOGETHER Doctors and police from two cities worked seamlessly to transport a heart more than 350km to save a life. In a little more than two hours, a heart harvested from a braindead woman in south Bangalore reached a patient in a hospital in south Chennai on Wednesday . “This is the first time we are attempting an interstate heart transplant. A heart can be kept in cold storage for up to four hours, but we gave ourselves a window of three hours. In the end, it was done in two hours thanks to coordination by police and airport staff,“ said Harish Manian, facility director at Fortis Malar hospital in Chennai. When the Air India flight took off at 3.22pm from Bangalore, doctors in Chennai started prepping the patient for the surgery. “It takes an hour for the prep, including administering anaesthesia and opening the chest. By the time we did that, the heart had reached the hospital,“ said Manian. Five hours later, at 8.30pm, the team declared the surgery a success. Everything fell into place for the recipient in Chennai. No one else on the waiting list in Karnataka met the requirements and the timing of the flight coincided with the time of the harvest. “The biggest drawback to interstate transplant is the timing of flights. Chartered flights are very expensive,“ said an official from the Tamil Nadu Organ Sharing Registry . In the software city of Bangalore, where traffic is always nightmarish, the heart had to travel 55km from BGS Global Hospital in south Bangalore to Kempegowda International Airport at the other end of the city . This was done in 45 minutes between 2.10pm and 2.55pm. In Chennai, the ambulance was allowed through a special gate right up to the tarmac to receive the heart after the plane landed at 4.10pm. The traffic police took over and did it in style, regulating traffic and keeping all signals open for the ambulance to go past. “It took us seven minutes--4.30pm to 4.37pm--to cover the 12km stretch between the airport and Adyar,“ said a senior traffic official who was in charge of the planning. The ambulance whizzed past 11 junctions, including the ever-bustling Pazhavanthangal, Halda junction, Little Mount Road, Gandhi Mandapam Road and LB Road. Each junction had three police persons manning traffic and a patrol vehicle on standby . Doctors said finding a perfect match for a heart transplant was extremely difficult. “The heart is a peculiar organ. Several parameters have to match, including the blood group, size and age. A lot of hearts are wasted because of this. Now that we have broken the logistical barriers between states, we can expect to do more such transfers,“ said the official from the transplant registry. As per an order issued by the TN government, the identity of either the donor or the recipients should not be made public before the date of discharge of recipients. Source - Times Of India
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 05:57:29 +0000
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