Mumbai: Barely 40 days after 38-year-old Mahesh Padav made history as the first patient to undergo a heart transplant in the civic-run KEM Hospital in Parel in 56 years, the Sambhajinagar resident passed away in a hospital near his home.
“He suddenly got a fever on Aug 21, and passed away within 24 hours of getting admitted to the hospital,” said his brother-in-law Vijay Rane from Sambhajinagar. Doctors said there is no clarity yet on the cause of his sudden death; it is possible he contracted an infection or his body could have begun rejecting the transplanted heart, leading to the death of the former rickshaw driver who has two daughters aged 13 and 11, in the early hours of Aug 22.
The family had just celebrated one month since his heart transplant. “It was too sudden and we are still coming to terms with it,” said a relative. Padav was in hospital for a month or more when a brain-dead patient’s husband agreed to donate her heart on July 11. The hospital’s cardiac surgery team, which was in a state of readiness to revive the hospital’s heart transplant programme, carried out the transplant on July 12. Padav stayed in KEM Hospital for 21 days as a precaution against infections. He was discharged on Aug 1, after making a good recovery. However, on Aug 21, he developed a high fever and didn’t recover.KEM Hospital is credited with the first two heart transplants in the country in 1968; its HOD Dr P K Sen was only the fourth surgeon in the world to perform the transplants. After KEM Hospital’s transplants were carried out in 1968, heart transplants began in Mumbai in 2015. However, only a handful of hospitals in the city offer the transplant so far, and cities in south India lead in the field.
KEM Hospital now has two patients in their early twenties on the waiting list for a heart transplant.
