Six-year-old girl gives new lease of life to nine-year-old boy

A nine-year-old boy got a new lease of life thanks to the generosity shown by the parents of a six-year-old girl who donated their daughter’s heart.

The boy, who underwent the heart transplant on March 8 at M.S. Ramaiah Narayana Heart Centre, has recovered and will resume normal life soon. Doctors claimed this is the first paediatric heart transplant in the State.

The donor girl is from Chitradurga. She was suffering from Meningioma with obstructive hydrocephalus (brain tumour). She was under treatment at A.J. Hospital in Mangaluru. When she was declared brain dead by doctors, the family did not hesitate to donate their daughter’s organs.

The heart was retrieved by a team of doctors at M.S. Ramaiah Narayana Heart Centre and was airlifted from A.J. Hospital to Bengaluru airport. As transporting the heart through a chartered flight is expensive, doctors used the services of a commercial flight by requesting the airport authorities to exempt screening of the box containing the live heart.

New lease of life

“They cooperated and we were able to successfully transplant the heart within the four-hour time frame. A green corridor was created to take the heart from Bengaluru airport to the hospital and a distance of 36 km was covered in a span of 24 minutes,” said Nagamalesh, Senior Consultant, Heart Failure and Heart Transplant at the hospital.

The recipient is from Boni, a village in Visakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh. He was suffering from Dilated Cardiomyopathy with severe Left Ventricular dysfunction. He developed the immunological condition post viral fever. He was on medical management at M.S. Narayana Heart Centre for the last seven months and a heart transplant became inevitable.

The retrieval of the heart from the donor’s body was done by Julius Punnen, Senior Consultant Cardiothoracic and Heart Transplant. The transplant was performed by a team that included Dr. Punnen, Dr. Nagamalesh, Ravi Shankar Shetty, Senior Consultant Cardiothoracic and Heart Transplant Surgeon; Shilpa Rudradevaru, Cardiothoracic Surgeon; and Prashanth Ramamurthy, Consultant Cardiac Anaesthetist.