A heart harvested from a brain-dead road accident victim in Mumbai on Tuesday night was flown across 1,654km and transplanted six hours later into a 44-year-old woman at a Calcutta hospital early on Wednesday.

Dum Dum homemaker Anusha Adhikari has been put on ventilation support after the heart transplant, but doctors at Fortis hospital in Anandapur off EM Bypass say her condition is stable.

“The patient is stable, but will be kept under constant observation in an isolation ward for the next 24 to 48 hours,” said a hospital official.

This is the fourth heart transplant at the hospital after the first one was carried out in May last year when a heart harvested from a road accident victim in Bangalore was transplanted in a Jharkhand schoolteacher.

Anusha’s husband Goutam Adhikari said his wife had been suffering for over three years. She had breathing problems and used to get tired very fast. Tests revealed that she had been suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart loses its ability to pump blood because of enlargement of its main pumping chamber, the left ventricle.

She had to be hospitalised several times, including twice at Fortis, for breathing problems and water accumulation in the chest.

“She remained virtually bedridden for the past year. It was painful to see her needing help to even go to the washroom,” said Goutam, a supplier of construction material.

Anusha’s son Anik, who has just completed graduation from Seth Anandaram Jaipuria College, said his mother had hidden her ailment from him for a long time.

Anusha Adhikari A Telegraph picture

In December, Anusha had spent over a week at Fortis and then a couple of months at a local hospital. Last month, when her breathing problems resurfaced, she was rushed to Dum Dum Municipal Hospital and later to Fortis after water accumulated in her chest.

Doctors at Fortis advised transplant for Anusha. She was chosen as the recipient for the transplant after her blood group (B positive), body weight and another blood parameter called CDC matched with that of the donor.

Concerted efforts of multiple agencies facilitated a green-channel transportation of the organ from Mumbai to Calcutta, said a Fortis official.

The 16-year-old donor was declared brain-dead at Global Hospital in Parel on Monday and his family consented to donating his organs. The surgery to retrieve the heart was completed by 6.30pm in Mumbai. A team from Fortis, led by cardiac surgeon Ashima Bhelotkar, flew to Mumbai to harvest the heart from the brain-dead patient.

The heart was brought on an IndiGo flight that landed in Calcutta at 10.17pm. A seat was reserved on the plane for a box containing the heart. The organ, weighing around 500gm, was dipped in a solution called cardioplegia and packed with ice. The temperature in the box was maintained between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius. In Calcutta, the 20km journey from the airport to Fortis was made in 16 minutes.

Anusha was wheeled into the operating theatre at 9pm. A team of doctors —including cardiothoracic and vascular surgeons Tapas Raychaudhury and K.M. Mandana, cardiac anaesthesiologist and intensivist Saikat Bandopadhyay and anaesthesiologist Sanjay Singh — started the operation at 10.40pm and the heart was transplanted at 12.30am. The surgery ended at 3am, a hospital official said.

Though it took six hours for the heart to be transplanted since it was harvested in Mumbai, doctors at Fortis said the donor’s age helped.

“Ideally, a heart should be transplanted within four hours of being harvested. It can, however, be stretched by a couple more hours. It helped because the donor was so young and the heart was in good shape,” said Mandana.