Kolkata: Covid man gets new lungs in night-long operation

KOLKATA: Lung transplant made its debut in eastern India after doctors in Kolkata carried out a double lung transplant procedure on a man (46) in an operation that started late on Monday and continued till Tuesday dawn.
The recipient was an executive at an IT major, who contracted the novel coronavirus in June and was subsequently, shifted to Medica Superspecialty from another hospital with severe Covid pneumonia.As his condition did not improve even after 90 days on ECMO, the hospital, in consultation with his family, registered his name for lung transplant with National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO) and Regional Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (ROTTO).

NOTTO on Monday shared the details with ROTTO when Manish Shah, a 52-year-old patient at United Green Hospital, Surat, was declared brain dead. Medica, which was waiting for a matching lung, applied for the organ when ROTTO offered it.
A seven-member team from Medica flew to Surat on Monday morning, retrieved the organ and flew back at night. The transplant started around 10.30pm and it took almost seven hours to complete. The patient was finally wheeled out of the OT around 10.30am on Tuesday.
Medica vice-chairman and cardiac surgeon Kunal Sarkar, who also heads Medica Institute of Cardiac Sciences, said, “Lung transplant on a Covid patient is high-risk and challenging. Post-Covid lung transplant is one of the most stringent surgical challenges. Our team was equal to the task. We have covered some distance, but still have some way to go.”
The procedure was carried out by an extensive team from cardiac surgery and cardiac critical care that included doctors Kunal Sarkar, Saptarshi Roy, Arpan Chakraborty, Dipanjan Chatterjee, Mrinal Bandhu Das, Tripti Talapatra, Ashutosh Samal, Soumyajit Ghosh, Shravan Kumar, Writuparna Das, Saibal Si and Hirak Suvra Majumder, and were assisted by Deblal Pandit, Saibal Tripathy and Soumalya Mitra.
“Having the experience of running the largest ECMO programme of India, and all of Asia, we are familiar with the difficulties of severe Covid. For those who do not respond to ECMO, lung transplant is an option. We hope our recipient makes a satisfactory recovery,” said ECMO specialist Arpan Chakrabarty and cardiac critical care specialist Dipanjan Chatterjee.
“Our sincere thanks to the state for supporting the transplant programme. We are also thankful to Donate Life, police and CISF personnel in Surat as well as Kolkata,” said Medica chairman Alok Roy.
Surat NGO Donate Life counselled the family of the deceased to donate his organs. It helped ferry the organ till Surat airport. “We are happy to have played a small role in facilitating eastern India’s first lung transplant,” said Nilesh Mandlewala of Donate Life.