^{Liver transport saves Bengaluru boy's life, green channel helps bring in organ in record time}

TADEPALLI (GUNTUR): It is literally a rebirth for an 18-year old boy Navin from Bangalore, with an acute biliary atresia disease associated with liver, thanks to a team of doctors who performed liver transplantation through a green channel in Manipal Hospitals here on Saturday.
Biliary atresia is a rare disease of the liver and symptoms of the disease develop two to eight weeks after birth.Dr. Olith Selvan, Chairman, Division of Liver Transplant and consultant Herpetologist, who led the 10-hour long surgery, told TOI that the boy was born without the bile duct in a rarest of rare case which itself is called biliary atresia.
As a result, bile produced by cells within the lever that helps to digest fat failed to come out into the intestines and got accumulated within the liver itself. The symptoms were noticed when the boy was three months old and a surgery called Kasai was performed on the patient to make the condition of liver better as a temporary arrangement at that time. The poor parents of the boy could not go for the next surgery to release his key organ from the `bad’ condition as a lasting solution till he turned 18. “When Navin was brought to our hospital, his liver was so badly damaged that it failed to let out the wastes and that the transplantation was only the remedy," Dr. Olith recalled.
At this juncture, an offer came from an unknown donor from the KIMS hospitals in Nellore. A green channel was created with the help of police so as to ensure that the organ reached the recipient hospital from the donor hospital in Nellore 300km away within a span of three hours. Jeevandan scheme coordinator Dr.Krishnamurthy made all the arrangements for retrieval of heart, kidneys and lungs along with the liver from the donor within a specified time. Somasekhar, a spokesman of the Manipal Hospitals, said a team of doctors was despatched to Nellore for transporting the liver in a safe condition in an ambulance. Dr. selvan said the whole exercise would become waste if the liver is retrieved and transplanted in the recipient body within six hours which thus necessitated a green channel for a hassle-free transport. The ambulance with the organ sped at a distance of 100km per hour with no traffic hassles on the Colkatta-Chennai national highway because of the police intervention to ensure that the vehicle reached its destination non-stop.
Dr. Selvan said Navin was `doing well’ after the surgery as the transplanted liver began its mechanism of delivering bile without any hitch as usual as in any normal human being. He will be discharged from the hospital within 10 days after keeping him under observation.