Gurgaon: At 7am on a September morning this year, 55 doctors and nurses trooped into six operation theatres (OTS) at Medanta for something none of them had done before. The OTs had a patient each. Three of them were to donate their livers and three would be recipients in a marathon 12-hour surgery that would follow to accomplish a milestone the country’s first successful three-way liver transplant swap. Each donor was related to one of the recipients, but the ir livers were not being transplanted within the family since they weren’t compatible. So, transplant specialists decided on a three-way transplant, or a paired exchange, on September 11 that all three families agreed to. Effectively, each donor was saving two lives of a stranger and a family member. The three recipients-all suffe ring from terminal liver disease-got the transplants simultaneously. They are recovering well, doctors said on Thursday, after monitoring the patients for more than three months.
Sanjeev Kapoor (51), a businessman from Madhya Pradesh, and Aadesh Kaur (59), a homemaker from Delhi, had liver failure. Saurabh Gupta (32), a businessman from UP, was suffering from advanced liver cancer. All three had already waited in the donor queue on the transplant list for a year.