An 18-year-old girl selves to talk and discuss. . whose heart was significantly underperforming for years underwent a heart transplant at a Howrah hospital on Saturday.

The heart came from a 23-year-old man who died at the SSKM Hospital after a road accident.

After the surgery ended, the girl was still on a ventilator at the Narayana Superspeciality Hospital on Saturday evening. She would remain so at least till Saturday night, said the surgeon who performed the transplant. Doctors will monitor her condition.

The girl was suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition under which the power of the heart’s muscles to contract significantly reduces, said Debasis Das, the surgeon. “In such a situation, the heart’s performance, its ability to pump blood is severely impacted,” said Das.

As a result, blood supply to other organs of the body gets affected and the performances of those organs also get impacted owing to less supply of blood.

The surgery star ted around 1pm on Saturday and ended around 5pm.

Earlier a team of doctors had gone to SSKM Hospital to retrieve the organs of the deceased man.

Das said the girl had to be admitted to the hospital multiple times and she was enrolled for heart transplant about four months back.

A team of several doctors were involved in the retrieval of the organs and the subsequent transplant. They include Nilanjan Dutta, Pradeep Narayan, Manish Sharma, Rangan Koley, Shubhadeep Das, Amitabha Chattopadhyay, Sanjiban Ghosh and Jayita Nandy.