Golden heart in mouth, race saves lives
G.C. SHEKHAR
Chennai, Jan. 1: Dr Krishna Gopal will live not only in the memories of the 400 patients on whom he performed heart surgery but also in the heart of one he could not operate on. The dead surgeon’s heart is now beating in this patient’s body. Just as his kidneys have saved two more lives. The transplants were made possible against a tight deadline through a feat of co-ordination — which almost mirrored Hollywood — between four hospitals in three cities and the police of Chennai and Madurai, who cleared the roads to city airports. The state medical authorities did their bit, speedily granting a crucial licence. The organs were all transplanted last night, after Dr Gopal, 40, had died of head injuries caused by a fall from the terrace of his apartment in Madurai. The chief cardiac surgeon at Madurai’s Vadamalayan Hospital was declared brain dead on Wednesday after being admitted to the same hospital on December 26. His wife Jeyapriya Gopal, a media co-ordinator with Chennai’s Frontier Lifeline Hospital, immediately decided to donate his organs. “After keeping him alive through a ventilator for four days, the doctors said there was no brainstem activity. Since my husband had always talked about the merits of organ donation, I knew he would have wanted it this way,” Jeyapriya said. “So we told the doctors the body should be prepared for harvesting the heart, liver and kidneys. For someone who has performed 400 heart surgeries with a high success rate, there could be no greater tribute than his own heart beating in another patient’s body.” So a team of doctors flew in from Chennai’s Frontier Lifeline, where Dr Gopal had once worked before joining the Madurai hospital to serve the rural population. However, Vadamalayan Hospital’s application for an organ transplant licence was still pending. The director of medical services solved the problem by granting it on Wednesday itself. The Chennai doctors reached Madurai yesterday morning. They began removing the heart at 5.45pm and completed the job in less than an hour, in keeping with airline schedules — a harvested heart has to be transplanted within four hours. The organ was put in a double-walled, sterile and cooled container — an 18-inch cube-sized box — and rushed to the airport, 12km away, in an ambulance. The police blocked traffic en route for 40 minutes.
At 7.20pm, Paramount Airlines’ Madurai-Chennai flight took off, with a doctor carrying the box as cabin baggage. The flight landed at 8.20, but the hospital was still a 14km drive away through one of Chennai’s busiest roads, bustling with New Year’s Eve traffic. Chennai police, informed in advance, created a “green corridor”, allowing the ambulance to make it in 30 minutes. At Frontier Lifeline, surgeons had already opened up the patient’s chest and put the recipient (whose identity cannot be revealed) on a heart-lung machine. The transplant was able to meet the deadline. Creating green traffic corridors for the sake of transplants is common in Chennai.
Dr Gopal’s liver and eyes were found unfit for transplant — they were probably damaged by the fall — but his kidneys were taken out. Kidneys have a 12-hour transplant deadline. One was driven to another Madurai hospital, Meenakshi Memorial, which already had a functioning transplant unit. The other was put in the same kind of box as the heart and driven to Tirunelveli, where a patient was waiting. Aided by a police escort, the ambulance made the 160km distance in three hours and the organ was transplanted the same night. In spite of her grief, Jeyapriya personally co-ordinated the entire operation. “Getting the organs transplanted successfully was the only objective at that time. Else, my husband’s gift would not have benefited anyone,” said the mother of a 12-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter
good story....
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