Family who lost son on Eid donates his organs to save two lives in Delhi

NEW DELHI: A grieving family of Muslim labourers gave a life-changing gift to a boy and a young man on Eid. They donated the organs of their nine-year-old son who was declared brain dead on April 21 after an accident.
Doctors tried to revive the boy, who was brought to AIIMS on April 15 with severe head injuries after a two-wheeler accident. They couldn’t.
After the AIIMS organ retrieval banking organisation spoke to the family, they signed the consent forms on April 22. The boy was the youngest of the five children of the couple who did not have the heart to speak about the donation. The family is from Mewat in Haryana.
The boy’s cousin told TOI that the decision was a tough one for the entire family. He was the youngest, and they lost him at the time of the festival, he said. “If his organs can save the lives of others, then it’s the best gift to him,” the cousin said.
The boy was born with one kidney, which AIIMS confirmed after a CT scan and a USG of his abdomen. It was retrieved to be donated to a 20-year-old youth from Haryana’s Bahadurgarh, admitted to AIIMS.
His liver has been given to a 16-year-old boy at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences, according to allocation by the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO), doctors in AIIMS said.
Both his corneas were retrieved by the RP Centre Eye Bank and will be given to patients in AIIMS in the near future. The boy’s heart valves were also retrieved to be used later. However, his heart and lungs were not found suitable for transplant by experts from NOTTO.
AIIMS doctors said this was the fifth paediatric donation in the age group of 1-12 years of the 19 donations at the JPN Apex Trauma Centre since April 2022.
Dr Deepak Gupta, professor of neurosurgery and faculty in-charge of the organ procurement team, trauma centre, said there is a myth that organs can be extracted for donation only from patients only between 18 years and 60 years of age. Organ donation can be done after brain death of a patient, irrespective of their age, he said.
“A set of two tests are conducted (repeated at interval of six hours in adults and 12 hours in children) by a team of four doctors for brain death certification according to the Transplantation of Human Organs & Tissues Act (THOTA),” he said. A brain-dead patient can give a new lease of life to an average of eight patients after consent is given by the patient’s family.
He said that in the case of neonatal donors, they are too small to recover organs for transplantation, especially those younger than one year of age. Finding suitable recipients for such young donors can be a challenge too.