VELLORE: Kidney transplants may be routine these days but five decades ago, it was a different story.
Very few people are aware that it was at the Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, that the first successful kidney transplant surgery in the country was performed. This important milestone in healthcare was achieved on February 2, 1971, on a patient named Shanmugam.
It was a Herculean task, then, and two specialists had to be dispatched to Australia to get trained on kidney transplant surgery.
Dr Mohan Rao, who led the team that performed the transplant, recalls, “There were three unsuccessful attempts (two in Mumbai and one in Varanasi) before that, using deceased donor kidneys. These operations were done in 1965 and 1966 by very senior professors. They concluded transplants will never succeed. CMC had planned it well before starting the transplant programme.
“Dr Chandy (then principal of CMC) deputed me and Dr KV Johny to Australia and both of us spent over two years at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide where the first successful transplant in Australia was done.
"I returned from Adelaide in November 1970 and started planning. Dr. Webb was the director and he was cautious. He warned me that if I lose the first patient, no one will come for a transplant. He told me to use what is available and succeed. Then he would support us," he says.
Infrastructure constraints could not dampen their quest to go where no hospital in the country had gone before. “As I could not get two operation theatres (one for the donor and the second for the recipient) during the day, I started the operation around 7 pm and finished close to midnight. I stayed with the patient till morning as I had no renal trained nurses and continued this practice till the team gained confidence,” he says.
The joy of Mohan Rao and his team knew no bounds when the years of hard work and labour paid off.
“The transplanted kidney started producing urine and continued. There were no complications and the patient was discharged after two weeks,” Mohan Rao recollects.
The patient had narrated his experience at the time: “After the transplant, I opened my eyes in the sterile room. I was surprised to find the full urine bag by my bedside. I sent a message outside informing relatives about my health and inquiring about the health of my father, whose kidney had started doing its vital job in my body. For about three weeks, I recovered in a sterile isolated room.”
The hospital management kept the successful kidney transplant under wraps but somehow it got leaked.
Mohan Rao says, "We did not announce the news but it had leaked and was on All India Radio and in the local newspaper by morning. We did another transplant three weeks later with good results. That was the start of kidney transplantation in India."
He is currently serving with the University of Adelaide as associate professor of surgery.
CMC's Nephrology department has performed 3754 transplants from 1971 till March 2020.