On Monday, a pair of hands traveled 300 km in three hours from Bengaluru to JIPMER which were retrieved from a 22-year-old brain dead man and is likely to be transplanted to a Puducherry man, who has lost his hands in a factory crusher accident.
This is the first such case in Karnataka. The hands are preserved in a chemical solution and wrapped in ice slush.
According to the TOI report, the donor, Virat (name changed) was brought up in Bengaluru-Hosur belt and his family is from Bihar. He worked with a telecom service provider and met with an accident when he was heading to Anekal to collect money from a retailer on November 15. He sustained brain and spinal cord injuries and was taken to the Anekal government hospital from where he was later shifted to a private hospital.
His condition started deteriorating on November 16 and he was declared brain dead two days later. His parents agreed to donate his hands and other vital organs. Also, the donor was fitted with prosthetic hands, before the body was sent to post-mortem.
Authorities from Jeevasarthakathe, which is a state government body that approves cadaver organ donation has mentioned that no one had registered from the state seeking hand transplantation and that it has reached out to neighboring states. In an interview with TOI, an official said, “There is a lack of awareness of hand transplantation in the state.”
Apart from that, another brain-dead youth from Bihar has saved seven lives by donating his heart, heart valves, kidneys, liver and eyes for transplantation.
The retrieved hands were sent to Puducherry’s Jawaharlal Institute of Post Graduate Medical Education and Research on Monday, which reached there at 4:15 pm for the 31-year-old who was waiting for the surgery.
While Virat’s heart was donated to an 18-year-old girl from Madhya Pradesh who was suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy, which is a disease of the heart muscle; his liver was donated to a 67-year-old liver cancer patient from Bengaluru, who had been on the wait list since August 2018. His transplant was also done at Narayana Health City. Further, one of Virat’s kidneys were sent to a patient in Apollo Hospitals, Mysuru.