Srinagar, July 21: At a time when the protests and restrictions have brought life in Kashmir to a standstill, a team of doctors at SK Institute of Medical Sciences Soura literally gave a fresh life to a teenage patient by conducting successful kidney transplant.
 Wasim Wani son of Ghulam Ahmed, the 17-year-old boy from central Kashmir district of Budgam, as per the medicos, was suffering from kidney failure due to “congenital abnormalities of the urinal system”.
 His mother in mid thirties, Naseema donated a kidney for her only child. Naseema, a widow, had lost her husband just 11 months after the marriage. Wasim was born two months after his father’s death.
 For years  Naseema had been moving pillar to post for treatment to her only child.
 Finally, prominent Urologist, Dr Muhammad Salim Wani offered willingness to treat the patient provided somebody donates a kidney.
 As the mother volunteered to donate the vital organ, the kidney transplant finally realized on Monday.
 But unlike other kidney transplants, this one took more time because of some complicacies.
 Dr Wani who led the team of surgeons said: “The patient was technically a very difficult operation because of multiplicity of blood vessels of the donor kidney.”
 “The patient had five arteries and multiple veins. Normally a kidney has only one artery and a vein and it takes just 40 to 50 minutes to transplant such kidneys,” Dr Wani explained.
 Due to this all, the surgery took around six hours to complete.
 “This patient was technically very demanding case. It took lot of efforts to do the bench surgery(where instead of a standing posture, the surgeons sit on a bench to do the time consuming procedure),” Dr Wani said.
 How is the mother-son duo? “Well, both the donor and the recipient are doing well in the post operative period,” the surgeon said adding they would be discharged soon.
 But Dr Wani doesn’t take the success to his person alone. “It’s always a result of team work of many including the Operation Theater staff, the Nephrology and Anesthesiology departments,” he said.
 Besides others at SKIMS, he said the credit of this success goes to medicos like Dr Arif, Dr Shagufta Qazi, DR Khirat Muhammad, Dr Imtiaz Wani, Dr Rashid Rishi and Dr Zaffar Amin.
 Pertinently, the SKIMS team performed the delicate surgery at a time when most of the other hospitals in the City have reportedly shelved their surgery assignments in the wake of prevalent turmoil.
 Observers said performing such surgeries is possible only when the “entire hospital system is well in place.”
 “It’s not only performing the surgery. But also to ensure that every possible assistance to the patient because such cases require extra care as they have to be monitored very closely and constantly,” said a retired professor of Surgery.
 “So such a surgery is possible only when everything is well in place, which is quite unique in such turbulent situations,” he added.
 Meanwhile, the SKIMS Director, Dr Abdul Hamid Zargar, has complimented the team for the “extra ordinary work.”
 “This feat is in keeping with the SKIMS tradition of doing extra ordinary work in extra ordinary situations,” Dr Zargar said.

Lastupdate on : Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
Lastupdate on : Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 IST