Cape Town - When Groote Schuur Hospital surgeon Dr David Thomson finished his shift on Friday evening, he heard that there was potential organ donor in the Eastern Cape.
Little did he know a marathon multi-organ donor transplant operations were awaiting his team.
A few hours after he left for home to start his work-free weekend he received a call from the hospital’s transplant co-ordinator Fiona Mccurdie that he would have to be in East London the following morning to co-ordinate a team of doctors that would ultimately save the lives of four people across the country within a space of 18 hours.
A team of doctors that consisted of three surgeons from Groote Schuur, another surgeon from Joburg and East London surgeons were on a mission to harvest five organs from a trauma patient that had sustained head injuries and was declared brain dead.
In a rare occurrence in transplant history, four organs - including a heart, liver and two kidneys - were headed for one hospital, Groote Schuur Hospital, while a pair of lungs was destined for a Joburg private hospital.
“We had to be at the airport by 7am to catch an 8am flight, which ended up being delayed by more than two hours. When we got to East London everything had to be done so fast as we had to return to Cape Town immediately after the harvesting – in time to catch the 3pm flight back to Cape Town to perform the four transplants. There was no time to waste…bearing in mind that you can only keep the heart in an ice for a maximum of four hours,” he said.
While the team of doctors flew to East London, transplant patients as far as Port Elizabeth, King Williams Town and Knysna were alerted to come to their nearest hospitals to be flown to Cape Town for the transplants.
Back at Groote Schuur medics and other hospital staff were sorting logistics of the surgeries, ensuring that theatres were ready and there was enough staff and specialist surgeons to perform the transplants. Tissue typing and matching of the blood groups also had to be done throughout the night to ensure that the organs were not going to be rejected by recipients.
One of the patients Nobelungu Mayekiso, 51, from King Williams Town, who had been on the waiting list for a kidney for five years, was on her way to a funeral when she received a call on Saturday morning to rush to Frere Hospital to get her medical files and flight details in preparation to come to Cape Town.
“I was so excited to receive that call. I quickly went back home and I just grabbed my ID book and my purse and headed for Frere Hospital. I didn’t care that I didn’t have a bag of clothes with me. All that was important to me was that I was finally going to receive a kidney, which I waited for five years for.”
It was 6am when another transplant recipient Namhla Sandla, 48, received a call from Livingston Hospital to come there in order to be flown to Cape Town – ending a nine-year-long wait for a kidney.
“I screamed (at the) top of my voice when I received that call. It was the end of my suffering, and I could already picture myself without having to dialyse every four hours. After this transplant I feel so great that I’m ready to look for employment again. I had to give up my job as an administrator at the NPA (National Prosecuting Authority) because of kidney failure,” she told the Cape Argus on Thursday.
Thomson commended surgeons from Frere Hospital, who made sure that the harvesting of organs happened on time.
“When we got there everything was ready. The patient was already in theatre, and the hospital had supplied a surgeon as well as an anaesthetist team to assist us. All we needed to do was to double-check paperwork and make sure that the patient was the right one,” he said.
But after the clamping of the aorta to stop the blood supply from the patient, it was crunch time for the transplant team as the organs had to be transplanted within a limited time. There was only a four- hour window to transplant the heart, while the liver had to be transplanted within 12 hours. Kidneys can stay on ice for up to 24 hours.
But thanks to a dedicated team of doctors at Groote Schuur, all four transplants, including a marathon 12-hour liver transplant, were completed within 18 hours of the organs arriving in Cape
None of which which would be possible without a family having the courage to support organ donation in a time when they had just lost a loved one to tragedy.
Cape Argus
* To register as an organ donor visit The Organ Donor Foundation website www.odf.org.za