Doctors transplant organs of deceased girl to three patients in Kyiv amid Russian attack

Doctors performed a transplant of organs from a deceased four-year-old girl in Kyiv under Russian attack. The procedure saved the lives of three other children. This was the first such transplant in the history of the medical institution.

Source: National specialised children's hospital Okhmatdyt

Details: The four-year-old patient from Zhytomyr Oblast was brought to the medical facility at the end of last week. On the night of 9-10 July, a medical consultation declared her brain dead.

The doctors, together with psychologists, received the agreement of the girl's family for the posthumous donation of her organs.

"This decision is heroic. It saved three lives at once," the doctors said.

Medical staff say that after the girl's family approved the agreement, the hard work of specialists began. The difficulties were providing logistics, selecting recipients and organising operations in the face of air raids and missile attacks.

The Unified State Transplantation Information System (USTIS) helped to find the children who would receive the transplants. Two of them were already in Okhmatdyt.

Among them was a 16-year-old girl with Wilson's disease, who had the first emergency status for liver transplantation. The doctors said she was in intensive care and the new organ was her only chance of survival.

In addition, kidneys were transplanted to a 14-year-old boy who had been in the hospital for more than seven months due to dialysis, a medical procedure for blood purification.

The specialists of the Heart Institute of the Ministry of Health also transplanted a heart to a 12-year-old girl with the first emergency status.

In total, the operations lasted over 13 hours. The doctors did not stop, even despite the issuance of an air-raid warning and nighttime explosions. The reason is that transplantation is most likely to be successful if the organs spend as little time as possible outside the body.

"Our recipients were very difficult. And I am sincerely grateful to the parents [of the deceased girl] for understanding that their decision gave a chance for life to three children," said Oleh Hodik, transplantologist at Okhmatdyt.

Background: Earlier, Kyiv doctors saved three-year-old Bohdan, who had no biliary tract from birth. The baby received a liver transplant from his father.

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