A medical team transporting the heart harvested from S. Shibu, a Kollam native, who was declared brain-dead, to the General Hospital, Ernakulam, where it was transplanted into a 22-year-old Nepali citizen, on December 22.
| Photo Credit: H. VIBHU
After a long and arduous wait, Nepali national Durga Kami finally received a new lease of life after undergoing a heart transplant on Monday at the General Hospital, Ernakulam.
The surgery was successful, and the patient has been kept on ventilator. She will be under observation for the next 48–72 hours, the hospital authorities said. The procedure lasted four hours.
With the landmark procedure, the General Hospital became the first district hospital in India to perform a heart transplant, according to the hospital authorities. The transplant surgery became possible following judicial intervention. Although Ms. Kami, a 22-year-old orphan, was on the super-urgent heart transplant list as her condition could lead to fatal complications, the law initially posed a hurdle, doctors said. The law stipulates that Indian nationals requiring heart transplants should be given priority when donor hearts are allocated.
The heart, retrieved from 46-year-old S. Shibu, a Kollam native who was declared brain-dead at the Government Medical College Hospital, Thiruvananthapuram, was transplanted to Ms. Kami, also known as Arpana, who had been seeking medical treatment in India for close to a year for a heart ailment.
An eight-member team of doctors from the General Hospital, including Dr. George Valuran, Dr. Paul Thomas, and Dr. Geo Paul, left for Thiruvananthapuram on Monday morning to retrieve the heart. The surgery, which began at 11 a.m., continued beyond 1 p.m. as several organs had to be harvested. “The heart was airlifted to Kochi and received at the theatre at the General Hospital around 3.15 p.m.,” a hospital source said.
Ms. Kami was admitted to the General Hospital on Sunday night (December 21) to prepare her for the transplant. Since HLA matching — the process of matching human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes between the donor and recipient to reduce the risk of graft rejection — and blood group matching were successful, doctors had been waiting with bated breath to see whether the heart was viable for transplant. Shibu, a victim of a road accident, had been on ventilator support for the past seven days. His heart, kidneys, cornea, liver, and skin will be transplanted into different patients, said Dr. Shahirsha, Medical Superintendent, General Hospital. The skin and one kidney will be donated to the Government Medical College, Thiruvananthapuram; the other kidney to Travancore Medical College, Kollam; the cornea to the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology, Thiruvananthapuram; and the liver to a private hospital, a hospital source said.
Published – December 22, 2025 09:32 pm IST
