Brain-dead peon’s heart benefits 24-year-old

PUNE: A brain-dead bank peon’s heart gave a new lease of life to a 24-year-old former BPO employee suffering from an end-stage heart disease at Ruby Hall Clinic on Tuesday.
This is the second heart transplant in Pune in which the donor’s heart was retrieved at the state-run Sassoon General Hospital to be donated to a patient at a private hospital.

The man’s liver also benefitted a 60-year-old Nagpur man suffering from end-stage liver disease at Sahyadri hospital the same day.

The donor (31) working with the Ahmednagar Road branch of a bank in Pune met with an accident near Ranjangaon when he was going to attend a marriage ceremony with four other friends in a car on February 20.

“Two of his friends died on the spot. The donor, however, had sustained grievous head injuries and was initially rushed to Inamdar hospital in Hadapsar. Later, he was shifted to our hospital on February 25,” Sassoon hospital’s transplant coordinators Arjun Rathod and Sandeep Kharat told TOI.

Despite medical treatment, the man could not be revived. He was declared brain-dead around 7pm on Monday. “His friends and colleagues took the initiative when we talked to them about organ donation. They later motivated the man’s relatives for organ donation,” metron Rajashree Korake of Sassoon hospital said.

The family hails from Rahuri in Ahmednagar district. “His family members consented to donate his heart, liver, lungs and kidneys around 12.30am on Tuesday,” Kharat said.

After the consent, the hospital authorities informed the Zonal Transplant Coordination Committee (ZTCC), Pune region. “As per the norms, we allocated heart to a patient at Ruby Hall Clinic and liver to another patient enrolled with the Sahyadri hospital,” transplant coordinator Aarti Gokhale of ZTCC, Pune region, said.

Two teams of doctors from Ruby Hall and Sahyadri hospital came to the Sassoon hospital and retrieved their allocated organs successfully by 5.30pm. “The heart was successfully transplanted into a man, who was working with a business process outsourcing (BPO) unit. He had to leave his job after he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, an end-stage heart disease in December last year,” Ruby Hall’s transplant coordinator Surekha Joshi said.

When contacted, spine surgeon Ajay Chandanwale, dean of the Sassoon General hospital, said, “In the last one-and-a-half-year, we successfully helped doctors retrieve 21 vital organs such as liver, kidneys, cornea and heart after seeking consent of their relatives.”

The donor’s kidneys were to be transplanted into a man suffering from renal failure at the Sassoon hospital. “This is the first time that both donated kidneys will be transplanted into a single recipient,” Chandanwale said. The surgery was on at the time of going to press.