MUMBAI: When Diva resident Prathamesh Tawade moved the fingers on his right hand, his father Madhukar and sister Shraddha were overwhelmed. As he had undergone hand transplant just last week, they had expected such movement would take months.
But there is a reason 22-year-old Prathamesh is “healing” relatively faster than the five others who have undergone hand transplant in the city so far.
“Prathamesh is perhaps the first patient in India to undergo a partial hand transplant. His right hand only needed three fingers and a bit of the palm to be transplanted from the donor,” said plastic surgeon Dr Nilesh Satbhai, who conducted the transplant at Global Hospital, Parel. Dr Satbhai and his team checked the medical literature but only found one mention from China.
Usually, when only a few fingers of a hand are amputated, doctors don’t seek a transplant (as transplant patients need to take immuno-suppression drugs for life) but do reconstruction surgery using toes. “But Prathamesh needed a transplant due to the left foreram, so we decided to do a partial transplant in the right one as well,” said Dr Satbhai. Luckily, the tendons in his right hand were still intact, and will allow quicker recovery. Prathamesh's left hand will take up to nine months to achieve good movement.
Prathamesh was working as a contract labourer in a tyre company in April 2021 when he lost his entire left palm and a portion of his right palm. “My brother got very depressed and refused to go out because of the accident,” said Shraddha. He then saw a video of Monika More, the city's first hand transplant patient, on a social media site and contacted the hospital authorities.
Within a fortnight of him registering for a transplant, the hospital got an alert about a Surat family agreeing to donate the arms of their brain-dead 28-year-old son. “We only have Rs 5 lakh that we got as compensation from the company, but the hospital has agreed to help out with the transplant cost and rehabilitation,” she added.
