A young girl from Karachi, Pakistan, and her family have been given a new life by an Indian heart following a transplant procedure at MGM Healthcare in Chennai.
Ayesha Rashan, a 19-year-old Pakistani girl, waited for five years with an ailing heart. On January 31, doctors at the MGM Healthcare in Chennai gave her the heart of a patient, who was hospitalized in Delhi and was 69 years old and brain-dead.
Ayesha first travelled to India when she experienced a cardiac arrest and heart failure in 2019. A heart transplant was suggested by senior cardiac surgeon Dr. KR Balakrishnan, who was working at Malar Hospital in Adyar at the time.
On the state organ registry, she was placed on a waitlist. Her doctors gave her a left ventricular assist device, a surgically implanted mechanical pump that helps the left ventricle pump blood, as a stopgap measure before a transplant.
She returned home by plane, but in 2023, her heart failed on the right side as well. She had an infection as well.
"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," said her mother, Sanober Rashan.
The only option, according to Dr. Balakrishnan's team in September 2023, was a heart transplant. On January 31, after visiting the hospital multiple times, Sanober got a call from the facility.
"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," said Dr KG Suresh Rao, co-director at the hospital's Institute of Heart and Lung Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support. "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."
After a successful surgery, Ayesha was taken off life support a few days later.
Rashan was admitted with severe heart dysfunction, according to the doctors. After developing heart failure, she was placed on ECMO, a type of life support for patients with potentially fatal illnesses or injuries that impair lung or heart function.
But later on, a valve leak in her heart pump required a complete heart transplant.
Before Rashan was allowed to leave the hospital on April 17, her family paid the hospital bill with money donated by the NGO Aishwarya Trust, past patients, and medical professionals. According to the doctors, the cost of a heart transplant can be around 3.5 million Indian rupees.
Her family claimed that without the trust's funding and the doctors in Chennai, they would not have been able to pay for the surgery. Since Ayesha's health is stable, she is free to go back to Pakistan.
