The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Liver transplant gives him fresh lease of life

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Aug 04, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Liver transplant gives him fresh lease of life

By Our Staff Reporter

Rameshchandra Patra

HYDERABAD, AUG. 3. An act of magnanimity, cutting across States, gave a fresh lease of life to a 53-year-old advocate when he underwent a liver transplant surgery at the Global Hospitals here on July 26.

The patient, Rameshchandra Patra, an advocate practising in the Supreme Court, hailed from Berhampur. The cadaver liver for transplantation came from the brain-dead electrician, Dhanasekhar, from Vellore, and the Global Hospitals, Hyderabad, became the venue for successful life-saving surgery.

The donor

When 33-year-old Dhanasekhar, an electrician working at a hostel in Vellore, suffered a head injury on July 24, doctors at the Christian Medical College Hospital, Vellore, put him on ventilator and declared him brain-dead.

An innocuous inquiry by a brother of Dhanasekhar whether he could be revived with a brain transplant galvanised CMC Hospitals' Transplant Co-ordinator, Sahayam, into action. After convincing Dhanasekhar's widowed mother, brothers and sisters that though Dhanasekhar could not be brought back to life, he could live in others if his organs were donated, the CMC doctors, with their consent, retrieved two kidneys, two corneas, the liver and heart of Dhanasekhar.

Hectic coordination

From then on it was hectic co-ordination between the CMC Hospital, the Multi Organ Harvesting Aid Network (MOHAN) Foundation in Chennai and Hyderabad, Foundation for Organ Retrieval and Transplant Education (FORTE), Bangalore, to ensure that the donated organs were brought in time to different hospitals for transplantation.

Team of experts

Mr. Patra, suffering from Hepatitis B virus-related liver cirrhosis, was transplanted with the liver on July 26 by a team of surgeons, including Parthiban Srinivasan, liver transplant surgeon from the King's College Hospital, London. The Global Hospitals doctors who were in the team were K. Ravindranath, Balbir Singh, Chandrika, surgical gastroenterologists, P.B.N. Gopal and Krishna Prasad, anaesthesiologists.

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