How the Indian Heart Saved This Pakistani Teen After a Five-Year Battle for Survival

At a Chennai hospital, a 19-year-old Pakistani girl named Ayesha Rashan recently received the heart of a 69-year-old Indian patient who was brain dead. With a sick heart, the teenager had been waiting for five years.

Ayesha initially traveled to India in 2019, the Times of India said, after a cardiac episode and subsequent heart failure.

According to the report, senior cardiac surgeon Dr. K. R Balakrishnan, who was working at Malar Hospital in Adyar at the time, recommended a heart transplant. The state organ registry wait list was then added to her. Nevertheless, the physicians offered her a left ventricular assist device because of her illness and the lengthy waiting period for a donor heart.

The apparatus is a mechanical pump that is surgically inserted to assist the left ventricle in pumping blood. She reportedly took a plane home, but in 2023 her heart’s right side failed as well. She was infected as well.

“Watching my kid go through that kind of suffering was awful. We made contact with the surgeon. As to Ayesha’s mother, Sanober Rashan, “We told him we couldn’t afford surgery, but he asked us to come to India.”

The Rashan family was informed by Dr. Balakrishnan’s team in September 2023 that a heart transplant was the only course of action.

Following many hospital stays, the story said that Sanober got a call from the hospital on January 31. It went on to say that physicians at MGM Healthcare, headquartered in Chennai, then handed the Pakistani youngster the heart of a 69-year-old patient who was brain dead and had been transferred from a hospital in Delhi.

Foreigners are only given hearts when there isn’t a single potential receiver in the nation. Many surgeons were hesitant to operate on this patient since their heart was that of a 69-year-old, according to Dr. K G Suresh Rao, co-director of the hospital’s Institute of Heart and Lung Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support.

He was cited as saying, “We knew this was Ayesha’s only chance, so we decided to take the risk in part because the donor’s heart was in good condition.”

After a successful operation, Ayesha was taken off life support a few days later. Rashan’s family paid the hospital cost before she was released from the hospital on April 17 using money donated by the non-profit Aishwarya Trust, past patients, and medical professionals, according to the story.

According to specialists cited by TOI, the cost of a heart transplant might reach Rs 35 lakh.

Ayesha told the magazine, “I can breathe easy now.” My intention is to finish my education in Karachi. My goal is to work as a fashion designer.