A green corridor was created in Bangalore and Chennai, on Wednesday, to facilitate a long distance heart transplantation, and the total duration took a little more than a couple of hours.
The journey from the Balagnagadharanatha Swamiji (BGS) Hospital, Bangalore, to the Fortis Hospital in Adyar Chennai, would normally take around seven hours to complete, considering the traffic and the airport formalities. This journey was miraculously completed within just over two hours, in order to transfer the heart of a brain dead patient from one city to another.
The heart belonged to a 38-year-old woman, who had met with a scooter accident. She was declared brain dead, but her organs could still have been used to save other flickering lives.
"It took six hours for the husband to come," said KU Manjula, the coordinator of Transport at the Zonal Coordination Committee, Karnataka to IBN Live. "He was not aware of such a thing at all. Once he realised his wife is no more, he agreed that at least her organs can live through someone else."
The medical staff immediately swung into action, after receiving approval from the family, who believed that their loved one could at least live on through the body of another person, who is albeit, a complete stranger.
The staff at the BGS Hospital contacted the traffic police, who created a green corridor, for the transportation of the heart from the hospital to the airport. This journey took around 40 minutes. In normal circumstances, it would take more than one and a half hours.
From the airport, the heart was flown to the Chennai airport. In Chennai too, the traffic police had created a green corridor for the heart to be carried to the Fortis Hospital.
This journey from the Chennai airport to the Fortis Hospital, which is a 13 km stretch, took just seven minutes.
The total journey took two hours and seven minutes, but in normal circumstances, the journey would have taken around seven hours.
Doctors say that, after being removed from the body, the human heart generally stays usable till around seven hours. Thus, this journey would have been absolutely impossible, had the traffic police not created these green corridors.
Sources from within the Fortis Hospital say that the heart transplantion went smoothly without any glitches.
