The gift of a heartbeat: transplantation in India

In 1990 I joined the Heart Transplant team of Prof. Christian Cabrol at La Pitié Hospital in Paris — the surgeon who had performed Europe's first heart transplant in 1968. As the first Indian on that team, I took part in a programme of over 1,800 open-heart operations, 200 transplants and 40 artificial-heart implantations. What I brought home was not just technique; it was the conviction that transplantation is teamwork at civilisational scale.

The four-hour window

A donor heart survives outside the body for about four hours. Everything about transplantation flows from that constraint: the co-ordination between hospitals, the readiness of retrieval teams, the discipline of the recipient work-up. India's Transplantation of Human Organs Act gave us the legal framework in 1994. The infrastructure has grown ever since. The bottleneck is awareness.

What stands between patients and new hearts

Families are rarely told, at the hardest moment of their lives, that their loss could save eight others. Brain-stem death is still poorly understood, even within parts of the medical community. Every family that discusses organ donation around the dinner table — long before any crisis — makes the decision easier if the day ever comes.

The road ahead

For patients with end-stage heart failure, the options today span mechanical assist devices, the artificial heart as a bridge, and transplantation as destination therapy. My vision remains what it has always been: that no Indian patient should have to leave the country — or lose hope — for want of a heart.