Lakeshore conducts liver transplant

Japanese patient Etsoku Kobayashi recently underwent a living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) at Kochi-based Lakeshore Hospital. Kobayashi was suffering from a severe case of primary biliary cirrhosis. The 15-hour-long surgery was conducted by Dr H Ramesh, Director, Transplantation Programme, along with a team of six anaesthetists and critical care surgeons and haepatologists.

“The patient was deeply jaundiced and her Model of End Stage Disease (MESD) score was 20 per cent, which meant that she would have had only two months,” Dr Ramesh recalled. Kobayashi’s husband, Mohammad Ibrahim Dunoo, came forward to be her donor.

The donor was thoroughly examined. “It was a risky case because here the donor was the patient’s husband. We did not want the husband to be the donor as the patient’s children would then be at a risk of losing both their parents. We evaluated a few other relatives of the patient,” said Dr Ramesh. However, Dunoo was zeroed in on as the apt candidate as the donor. Around 65-70 per cent of the husband’s liver was donated to Kobayashi.

The paradox is that despite coming from a country that a leader in the field of LDLT, 40-year-old Kobayashi opted to have the surgery in India. Back in Saitama in Japan, the waiting list was extremely long. The doctor had asked Kobayashi to wait for almost a year. Moreover, the surgery could not be covered by medical insurance.

Interestingly, Dunoo is an Indian from Kashmir, which Dr Ramesh feels could have also been another reason for Kobayashi to come to India.

EH News Bureau