Chennai: Renilson Joseph, 34, lost his wife and daughter in a car accident. While the businessman himself sustained multiple fracture, his 3-year-old daughter was declared brain dead. But in his hour of greatest sadness, Renilson signed the papers for harvesting his daughter’s organs, bringing a ray of hope for a 21-month-old Ahmedabad boy, the youngest heart transplant patient undergoing treatment at Frontier Lifeline in Chennai.

While Manipal Hospital used the girl’s kidneys on a 60-year-old, the liver was brought to Chennai’s Chettinad Hospital for transplant on a two-and-half-year old.

 

“When the hospital broached the subject, Renilson broke down, but agreed for multiple organ donation. We had a 60-year-old patient, a retired bank officer, waiting for renal transplant but we had no takers for the heart and the liver,” an employee of Manipal Hospital told TOI. The hospital decided to call up doctors in Chennai.

 

While heart transplant surgeon Dr K M Cherian agreed to send his team, liver transplant surgeon Dr M R Rajasekar decided to do the surgery at Chettinad Hospitals. The teams left Chennai in the wee hours of Wednesday. That the donor had the universal blood group, O+ve, made things easier for the surgeons to locate the recipients.

 

At 2.42 am, the transplant surgeons harvested the heart and other organs. The heart transplant team took a chartered flight and parallelly, a team in Chennai began to ready the 21-month-old Ahmedabad-based Etharth for surgery. “He was admitted to our hospital for severe cardiomyopathy (a disease of the heart muscle) and other structural problems of the heart,” said a transplant co-ordinator.

 

“We were all out of the theatre by 5 pm. In 2 hours and 42 minutes, the recipient’s heart was beating. That was all the time it took for harvesting, transporting and transplant. It was a combined effort by doctors, airport staff, traffic police and the private airline staff,” said Dr Cherian, who has led the country’s first inter-state heart transplant on January 11.