Brain-dead Saigon boy donates heart and liver to patient in Hanoi

Two organs were transferred from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi for transplant into two patients. This is the second case of cross-Vietnam organ transport.

The organ donor was a 20-year-old man who had a traffic accident and was left brain dead at Cho Ray Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City.The patient who received the heart transplant was a 64-year-old man who had suffered from heart failure and had had stents placed 9 times, with a life expectancy of only a few days. The recipient of the donated liver had been in end-stage liver failure for a long time, and was 54 years old.

On the afternoon of April 25, Cho Ray Hospital announced that a brain-dead person agreed to donate organs and would coordinate the heart and liver to be transplanted in Hanoi. At 5 a.m. onOn April 26, a team of doctors from Viet Duc Hospital flew from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City to receive organs.

The heart transplant patient's health is gradually recovering.

According to doctors, organ retrieval was quite difficult because the person had been brain dead for a long time, plus the longer transportation time, so the quality of the organs was lower than the previous organ transport. However, according to international parameters, this heart and liver block is very lucky to still be able to be transplanted.

As soon as the organs were loaded onto the plane, the surgical team at Viet Duc Hospital opened the chest and abdomen of the two patients to prepare for the transplant as soon as the organ source arrived.The two transplants began at 8:30 p.m. on April 26. The heart transplant was completed at 3 a.m. and the liver transplant ended two hours earlier.

According to Associate Professor Nguyen Tien Quyet, former Director of Viet Duc Hospital, fortunately, the parameters between the donor and recipient were compatible. The first day after the transplant, the liver was still functioning normally, but on the second day it stopped working and lost its function. Doctors and nurses resuscitated the patient and closely monitored his health during the recent holiday.

Currently, the two patients are awake, stable and eating normally.It is expected that both will be discharged from the hospital in about a week.

On the afternoon of May 6, Minister of Public Security To Lam and Minister of Health Nguyen Thi Kim Tien visited patients and congratulated Viet Duc Hospital.Sharing the difficulties with doctors in the organ transplant process, Minister To Lam said he would give Viet Duc Hospital two boxes of organ preservation tools worth nearly 5 billion VND.

Previously, in early September last year, Viet Duc Hospital also performed a liver and heart transplant from donated organs from a brain-dead donor transported by plane from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Taking advantage of eating, sleeping, and changing clothes in the car, more than 100 doctors and nurses from Cho Ray and Viet Duc hospitals coordinated to promptly remove the heart and liver from the donor in Ho Chi Minh City and transport them to Hanoi by plane for transplant to the patient. The time from when the liver and heart were removed until the transplant was completed was about 6 hours for the heart and more than 7 hours for the liver. After more than 20 days of transplantation, the two patients were stable and discharged from the hospital.

The main source of organs in our country today is from living donors, accounting for 95%. Transplants from brain-dead people account for a very small percentage. Currently, Vietnam has 10,000 traffic accidents each year; if 1/10 donated organs, many lives would be saved and Vietnamese people would not need to go abroad.

According to VNE