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A dire need of a heart transplant for a 56-year-old man suffering from heart failure resulted in two beating hearts.
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The patient’s heart measured to a small football whereas the donor heart of a 17-year-old was the size of a normal fist making it too small for the recipient.
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According to cardio-thoracic surgeon Dr. A. Gopala Krishna Gokhale, the lung blood pressure of the patient had increased more than four times the normal measure whereas the aortic systole pressure experienced a drastic fall.
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In such a scenario the doctors at Apollo was left with the only alternate option of Piggyback Heart Transplant.
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This procedure allows the doctors to implant the donor’s heart into the recipient’s chest without removing the diseased one.
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Till now only about 150 cases of such procedure has been recorded worldwide.
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After a green corrider was provisioned early in the morning, the donor’s heart was taken to Apollo Hospital in Hyderabad from Karimnagar.
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After cutting away some part of the pericardium from the donor’s heart, it was positioned between the right lung and the heart of the patient.
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The whole procedure took about 7 hours to complete and is, as Dr. Gokhale says, a “once-in-a-lifetime procedure a doctor performs”.
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The blood pressure of the patient is normal and his condition has been stabilized.
