Mom donates organ for 9-month-old son’s successful liver transplant operation

MUMBAI: A nine-month-old boy successfully underwent a liver transplant, making him the youngest child in western India to undergo the life-saving surgery.

Kavya Raut was born with a condition of biliary artesia in which the bile ducts of the body are either blocked or absent. His parents had made him undergo major surgeries in the past in the hope of curing this condition.These treatments, though, ended up further damaging his liver. His parents, Vivek and Nisha, are residents of Palghar.
Nisha donated a part of her liver which was transplanted into Kavya after a successful surgery. The transplant took place at Wockhardt Hospital, Mumbai Central, under a team headed by Dr Anurag Shrimal, consultant abdominal organ transplantation and hepatobiliary surgeon. “We could only fit a very small portion of her liver into the child’s body. The part we had to cut off weighed around 260gm. We further reduced it to 210gm so the child’s body could accommodate it,” said Dr Gaurav Gupta, hepatobiliary surgeon.
The baby’s mother said Kavya underwent his first major surgery when he was barely two months old.
“But none of these treatments were successful. His health started to deteriorate, and his weight would not increase,” said Nisha.
The team of doctors that operated on the child said that the surgery was challenging because of the recipient’s age. “Even the smallest of mistakes could have had the most disastrous effect. After the surgery, we also have to ensure that the liver expands and functions in a healthy manner so that the child can recover. It’s fortunate that Kavya took the surgery so well,” said Dr Shrimal.
The recipient surgery took almost 12-14 hours. “Anesthetizing a child for that long is a complicated process. We need to strike a perfect balance. We could not leave Kavya on ventilation for too long because that would increase the chances of him catching a lung infection, especially because we had reduced his immunity, so his body could easily accept the foreign organ,” said Dr Anjali Patki, anesthesiologist.
The child’s father, who works as a craftsman in a factory, said all the expenses for the transplant were borne by the hospital. While children as young as five months have undergone liver transplants in New Delhi, the procedure among very young children is picking up now in Mumbai.
Previously, a 17-month-old baby girl was one of the youngest to undergo the surgery in Mumbai.