Mother gives kidney to son in record surgery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7glRALjhEQ&feature=youtu.be A 42-year-old mother on Friday donated a kidney to her teenage son diagnosed with end-stage renal disease in a record five-hour surgery in Abuja. A 15-member surgical team at Garki Hospital, Abuja—Nigeria’s first experiment with public-private partnership in healthcare—performed the surgery Friday morning under lead of renowned transplant surgeon, Dr Nadey Hakim. Hakim is […]
A 42-year-old mother on Friday donated a kidney to her teenage son diagnosed with end-stage renal disease in a record five-hour surgery in Abuja.
A 15-member surgical team at Garki Hospital, Abuja—Nigeria’s first experiment with public-private partnership in healthcare—performed the surgery Friday morning under lead of renowned transplant surgeon, Dr Nadey Hakim.
Hakim is surgical director at West London Transplant Unit at Imperial College.
The surgery, followed widely on social media, is the second series he’s led at Garki Hospital, but the hospital’s own surgeons could take over future transplants in about a year, it is hoped.
Friday’s surgery was faster than the nearly eight hours the team spent on the first surgery earlier this year in a two-stage kidney transplant—removing kidney from a father and transplanting it into his 19-year-old son.
It took just around five hours to complete both stages for the 42-year-old mother who donated a kidney to her son, Hakim said, because the staff had become used to the procedure and instruments.
“The fact that we have managed to do that with the help of the nurses and doctors shows we will be able to do many more in the near future, now that the routine has been set,” said Dr Hakim after stepping away from the operating table.
“I am quite optimistic with the help of doctors and staff here, we will be able to do many more.”
In a year
Since kidney transplants started last year at Garki, which funds the kidney transplants and open-heart surgeries, its doctors are getting more confident handling high-precision surgeries.
“Perhaps in a year’s time, we can do it without him [Hakim] being present, but he will always be on the end of a telephone line,” said Garki’s medical director, Dr Elijah Miner, who assisted on the surgery alongside two other surgeons.
He is expected to take the lead on the hospital’s next kidney transplant while Hakim assists.
Kidney transplants are among top conditions that fuel the exodus of Nigerians for medical trips abroad.
Medical trips cost the country an estimated N80 billion annually, much of it lost to India, which has become a medical tourism hub to rival prime destinations Saudi Arabia, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Procedures as kidney transplants are not new in Nigeria, but centres offering them are so few, awareness about them is negligible.
New, upcoming centres have to beat scepticism among a wary public, battle for funding for the project and get notice.
‘It is just really the will to do it and the will to work toward it,” said Dr Miner. “Once you get people of like minds to be able to sit together and decide, ‘yes, we want to do this.’”
“We haven’t got all the equipment you have in Europe, but we have worked very hard and gotten the basic minimum that will make this sort of surgery safe.
On top of that, we have made sure that we have somebody of great experience that will be with us.
“Believe me, today there can be 20 transplant centres in the whole country easy. We have got the personnel, we just need the will and the help for the patients and ourselves in terms of training and funding.”
Younger, sicker
The teenage patient, who’s not being named, is symbol of concern over an increasing prevalence of kidney disorders among younger population.
Between damage, inflammations, disease and hereditary urinary tract defects, the number of young people having kidney problems in increasing, experts say.
“It is not really uncommon to have young people, especially in this our environment, coming down with kidney failure,” said Dr Manmak Mamven, consultant nephrologist at University of Abuja Teaching Hospital.
Experts warn of risk factors as hypertension, which affects an estimated 30 million Nigerians, and diabetes, which affects another 10 million Nigerians, alongside infections and indiscriminate use of painkiller drugs.
“A lot of them can damage the kidney and cause end-stage renal disease,” said Dr Mamven.
“These things are very common among us. So to target kidney disease from progressing, we advise regular check of blood pressure, blood sugar and a simple test to check your urine for protein.”