NEW DELHI: A poor family who lost their daughter due to irreversible brain injury set aside their grief and decided to donate their five-year- and-seven-month old’s organs at AIIMS on Friday so it could be used to save someone else’s life.
“Our daughter is no more. But at least someone else's child will survive because of her organs. That’s why we decided to donate,” Harnarayan Prajapati, the bereaved father, a tailor by profession, told TOI.
Organ donation by children is rare. Dr Deepak Gupta, professor of neurosurgery at AIIMS, said this is the first time such a young child’s family has agreed to donate the organs post brain death at the trauma centre.
“I salute the family. They put aside the grief of losing their young daughter and agreed to donate her organs so someone else could be saved,” Dr Gupta said. The girl, named Roli, allegedly suffered gunshot injury while playing at her house in Noida on Wednesday. The gunshot injury was confirmed in CT scan also, the AIIMS professor said. “When she was rushed to AIIMS, her condition was very critical. We tried to save her but finally, on Friday, she was declared brain dead. After that, our counsellors approached them with a request for organ donation and consent was taken,” he said.
The doctors retrieved the liver, two kidneys, heart valves and corneas from the brain dead girl. At the time of writing the article, the kidneys were being transplanted into a child at AIIMS while the liver was allocated to Indraprastha Apollo hospital by NOTTO where doctors prepared to conduct a liver transplant on another child from Lucknow.
Dr Aarti Vij, chief of the Organ Retrieval and Banking Organisation (ORBO) at AIIMS, said this was the fourth organ donation from a brain dead person at the institute this year.
Brain death results from a devastating brain injury, commonly due to head trauma, bleeding in the brain, stroke, or loss of blood flow to the brain after the heart stops (cardiac arrest).
