Heart flown from Bengaluru to Chennai for transplant

CHENNAI: The heart of a brain dead woman was harvested and flown from Bengaluru to Chennai on a commercial flight to be transplanted in a 35-year-old woman at a city hospital on Monday.
The donor who had suffered a stroke which damaged a vein in the brain was admitted to M S Ramaiah Hospital during the last week of November. However, she did not respond to treatment and was kept on artificial life support.
On Sunday evening, she was declared brain dead and her family agreed to donate her organs.
“The recipient, a woman who was suffering from a condition called dilated cardiomyopathy, was deteriorating and it was extremely difficult to find an organ for her as she had a rare blood group. So it was fortunate when the heart was allotted to us,” said Dr Suresh Rao, chief anaesthetist at Fortis Malar Hospitals in Chennai.
While a team of doctors got ready to go to Bengaluru to harvest the heart, they could not get an air ambulance immediately. So the surgical team at M S Ramaiah Hospital agreed to harvest the heart and send it by a commercial flight.
“The heart reached us at 7.30am on Monday and we completed the transplant successfully by noon. The patient is stable,” said the doctor.