A 22-year-old youth from Dhaniakhali in Hooghly district, around 60km northwest of Kolkata, underwent a heart transplant surgery at a hospital in Howrah on Sunday.
Doctors at Narayana Superspeciality Hospital, where the procedure was performed, said in the evening that the patient, Sheikh Naushad, had been taken off the ventilator. His condition was stable.
When the youth first turned up at the hospital in September last year, he was suffering from breathlessness and had swollen feet. He was unable to perform normal activities.
“He was suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy, which is the commonest cause for heart transplant,” said Debasis Das, a cardiac and heart transplant surgeon at the hospital.
“The heart muscles of a person suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy become so weak that the organ loses its normal pumping ability. The heart supplies blood to all other parts of the body. If the heart cannot pump blood properly, the other organs will suffer, too. This condition can even lead to death,” said Das.
The heart that was implanted in Naushad was donated by the family of a 36-year-old woman, who passed away at SSKM Hospital on Saturday. Doctors from Narayana went to SSKM to retrieve the heart.
The transplant surgery started at 12.30am and ended at 4am. “He is still in the ICU and will be kept under observation for a few more days before we discharge him,” Das said.
“Naushad was a mason but he had to quit his job because of his illness. When we first learnt that he needed a heart transplant, we told the doctors that we were unable to afford the surgery. They assured us that we would not have to pay anything,” said Sheikh Firoz, Naushad’s elder brother.
The brothers’ parents work as masons, too.
Surgeon Das said the hospital raised the money for the surgery through crowdfunding. Besides Das, Nilanjan Dutta and Pradeep Narayan were in the surgical team. The cardiology team was made up of Munna Das, Amitabha Chattopadhyay, Sanjiban Ghosh and Jayita Nandy.
The anesthesia and critical care team included Manish Sharma, Rangan Koley and Shubhadeep Das.