KOCHI: Kochi has of course been the undisputed hub for organ transplants. Proving it once again, three organ transplants were done at Amrita hospital at Kochi. The transplants also include Kerala’s first small bowel(small intestine) transplant.
38-year-old Mini Antony was declared brain dead at Reni Medicity, Kochi and the family gave consent to donate her organs like heart, kidneys, liver, small bowel and corneas. Out of these, the small bowel, heart and liver transplants were performed at Amrita Hospital.
Small bowel transplant was performed on 37-year-old Seena Shojan from Irinjalakuda. In the last six years, she has undergone multiple small bowel resection surgeries. The normal length of the small bowel is 5-6 meters. A normal human being requires at least 2 meters of small bowel for survival. Seena had only 96 cm length of small bowel. For the last one month she had been in a critical stage and was on total parenteral nutrition. In this condition the only option available was to do small bowel transplant. The surgery took around 6 hours to complete. After the surgery she is stable, the hospital authorities said.
Though she has started taking normal diet, the transplanted small bowel will take about two months to gain all its normal functions. During this period she will be under the strict observation of the doctors. Operation and procedure expenses were free.
The team which performed the small bowel transplantation was the same as the liver transplant team. The team includes Dr Sudhindran, Dr Sudheer O V, Dr Puneet Dhar, Dr Unnikrishnan G, Dr Ramachandran, Dr Dinesh Balakrishnan and Dr Lekshmi.
Similarly, a 45-year-old man who had end stage heart disease with multiple admissions for heart failure has successfully undergone heart transplantation at AIMS. The patient had been on medications and had swelling of limbs and had been suffering from breathlessness for the last three to four years. Due to his breathlessness and frequent admissions he had stopped going to work. He underwent heart transplantation on January 5, 2015. The transplant was done free.Cardiac transplantation is particularly effective for patients with end stage heart disease and relatively preserved functions of other systems. This surgery was performed by the heart team- Dr Louis, Dr Praveen Varma(Head- CVTS), Dr Navin Mathew(Cardiology) and Dr Abraham Cherian(Head- Cardiac Anaesthesia).
Liver transplantation was performed on Sindhu from Kottayam. She was suffering from acute liver failure. Now she is stable and has been shifted from ICU to room and may be discharged in couple of days. The hospital authorities said that the transplants were made possible by the selfless act of the family of accident victim. The organ donation was facilitated by the Kerala Network for Organ Sharing (KNOS) the Kerala Government’s Nodal Agency for Organ Retrieval and Sharing.