NEW DELHI: For the past five years, V K Jain had been on dialysis twice a week. It wasn’t easy removing excess water and toxins from blood mechanically. So, when the 73-year-old’s family was told about a cadaver donor willing to give away his
kidney, they saw a ray of hope.
However, hope came with a rider—the donor was 76 and doctors suspected the donated organ may not last long enough.
The doctors decided to conduct a dual
transplant to give Jain a new lease of life.
Normally, only one kidney is enough for optimal functioning. But doctors at Max hospital, Saket, took out
both kidneys and transplanted them into Jain. But the donated kidneys had to be operated upon to change their unusual structure before the transplant.
“Most kidneys have one renal artery supplying blood and occasionally there are two of them. But in this case, as luck would have it, both kidneys had four arteries making it a nightmare for the surgeons who had to meticulously connect the donor’s kidney arteries to the recipient’s,” Dr Dinesh Khullar, chairman, nephrology and renal transplant services, Max Super Specialty Hospital, Saket, said, adding that the surgery was successful and the patient was recovering well.
In India, nearly four lakh people require kidney transplant at any given time. At the most, 8,000 get donors. Others wait endlessly, sometimes succumbing even before a potential donor is identified.
Many have to survive through dialysis, a process by which a patient’s blood is cleaned of toxins by a machine. It is neither cost-effective nor a long-term solution.
Dr Khullar said the success of Jain’s transplant shows how with little caution even kidneys donated by brain dead patients who are
elderly can be put to use.