Dying youth gifts life to 4 across 3 cities
Indore/Delhi/Gurgaon: Traffic on five stretches across Delhi, Gurgaon and Indore made way as paramedics raced against time on Thursday to transport live organs for four critically-ill patients awaiting transplants. By late afternoon, all four organs — a heart, liver and two kidneys — had been successfully transplanted, thanks to precision coordination by various agencies in the three cities.
All four organs came from Deepak Dhaketa, an 18-year-old newspaper vendor in Indore who was declared brain dead by doctors at the city’s Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences (SAIMS) on Wednesday evening. After three counselling sessions, Dhaketa family overcame its grief and agreed to have the youth’s organs harvested.
While his kidneys were transplanted into two patients at SAIMS and Choithram Hospital and Research Centre, both in Indore, Deepak’s heart and liver were flown to Delhi.
The heart recipient was a 48-year-old woman suffering from end-stage heart disease at Medanta Medicity in Gurgaon while the liver went to a 55-year-old man suffering from liver failure at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) in Vasant Kunj. All recipients are stable post-transplant.
Indore Organ Donation Society secretary Dr Sanjay Dixit, who persuaded the youth’s parents to donate organs, told TOI that transporting the organs to various hospitals was a big challenge.
“Three green corridors were created within Indore city to transport the organs to CHRC and the airport. The first two were created at 11.23am and 12.02pm to transport Deepak’s liver and heart from to the airport — a distance of 11km that was covered in nine minutes. The third corridor was created simultaneously from SAIMS to Choithram Hospital, Indore, via a BRTS corridor for transporting a kidney,” he said.
Traffic police in Delhi said they received information about the green corridors around 11am. Police teams from the Vasant Vihar traffic circle were immediately put on alert for the ambulances carrying the organs, said Sharad Aggarwal, joint commissioner, traffic.
“The heart reached IGI airport around 1.15pm and was transported to Medanta Medicity in Gurgaon, covering about 18km within 16 minutes. The liver arrived at 1.58pm and it was transferred to ILBS, 11.4 km away, in 15 minutes,” he said.
Traffic lights on the ambulance route, from the airport to Gurgaon and Vasant Kunj, were turned green and the traffic personnel videographed the journey to identify vehicles obstructing the ambulance. “We would issue challans to the drivers obstructing the emergency vehicle,” Aggarwal said.
