A 19-year-old girl from Pakistan, Ayesha Rashan, was recently given the heart of a 69-year-old brain-dead Indian patient at a hospital in Chennai. The teen had been waiting for five years with an ailing heart.
According to a report in Times of India, Ayesha first came to India in 2019 when she suffered a cardiac arrest and went into heart failure.
Senior cardiac surgeon Dr K R Balakrishnan, who was then at Malar Hospital in Adyar, suggested a heart transplant, the report stated. She was then put on state organ registry wait list. However, considering her condition and the long wait for a donor’s heart, the doctors gave her a left ventricular assist device.
The device is a surgically implanted mechanical pump that helps the left ventricle pump blood. The report stated that she flew back home, but in 2023 the right side of her heart also failed. She also had an infection.
“It was terrible to see my daughter suffer like that. We reached out to the surgeon. We told him we couldn’t afford surgery, but he asked us to come to India,” Ayesha’s mother, Sanober Rashan, was quoted.
Dr Balakrishnan’s team, in September 2023, told Rashan family that a heart transplant was the only option.
After being in and out of the hospital several times, Sanober received a call from the hospital on January 31, the report stated, adding that doctors from Chennai-based MGM Healthcare then gave the Pakistani teen the heart of a 69-year-old brain-dead patient, flown from a hospital in Delhi.
“A heart is allotted to foreigners only when there is no prospective recipient in the entire country. Since this patient’s heart was that of a 69-year-old, many surgeons hesitated,” Dr K G Suresh Rao, co-director at the hospital’s Institute of Heart and Lung Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support, was quoted.
“We decided to take the risk partly because the condition of the donor’s heart was good and partly because we knew this was Ayesha’s only chance,” he was further quoted.
The surgery went well, and Ayesha was removed from life support a few days later. With funds pooled in by NGO Aishwarya Trust, former patients and doctors, Rashan’s family settled the hospital bill before she was discharged from the hospital on April 17, the report stated.
TOI quoted doctors as saying that a heart transplant can cost up to Rs 35 lakh.
Speaking to the publication, Ayesha said, “I can breathe easy now. I am planning to complete my schooling in Karachi. I want to become a fashion designer.”
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