KOLKATA: The city on Monday scored a big first in its efforts to ramp up its organ-donation campaign, with two city hospitals transplanting hearts — harvested from donors in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar — in two patients on a single day.The second of the two transplants came with its share of twin dramas. Recipient Rakhi Mandal was second-time lucky on Monday; her family had refused the first transplant offer last month. And the green-corridor transfer of the heart from airport to hospital — a 22-km, 24-minute journey through evening-rush-hour traffic — faced its own drama-in-reallife moment when one of the ambulance’s tyres burst in the middle of the journey on a crowded E M Bypass and the organ had to be transferred to a police pilot car for the remainder of the drive to the hospital.But, for both Mandal and Samiran Dutta (the recipient in Monday’s first transplant), the day ended peacefully, with their respective doctors’ teams expressing satisfaction with how the procedures went.The second transplant of the day involved 29-year-old Mandal and a heart that was flown in from Patna and then transported along the green corridor to the R N Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences. She was under treatment at the hospital for about a year after being detected with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM, a condition in which the heart loses power to pump blood). The procedure at RTIICS began around 6pm, almost immediately after the organ reached the hospital. The donor, a19-year-old boy, had sustained a head injury in an accident and was declared brain-dead at Patna’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences on Monday morning.Mandal was selected as the recipient for Mallika Majumdar’s heart after the 15-year-old Siliguri resident was declared brain-dead at SSKM Hospital on August 17 but her family backed out even as she was being prepared for the surgery. On Monday, however, her family agreed to the transplant, conducted by a team of heart surgeons comprising Mrinalendu Das, Lalit Kapoor, Atanu Saha, Debasish Das, Arup Ghosh and Pradip Narayan.This surgery came less than 24 hours after Fortis did a similar procedure on Dutta, a 51-year-old from Salt Lake, who — like Mandal — was suffering from DCM. He, too, was doing fine and was shifted out of the operation theatre around 4.30 a.m. on Monday and put on ventilation.“So far there is no cause for any major concern. The patient’s condition is stable. He needs close monitoring for the next 24 to 48 hours,” Fortis cardiothoracic surgeon K M Mandana said. This was the hospital’s second heart transplant surgery; Dilchand Singh, a private tutor from Jharkhand, was the recipient in the first such procedure conducted in eastern India.“This is yet another step towards a robust heart transplant programme in Kolkata,” cardiothoracic surgeon Tapas RayChaudhury, who was part of the transplant team, said on Monday.

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