Last Saturday, a 56-year-old man from Hyderabad underwent an operation to have a standard heart transplant surgery. But instead he left with two beating hearts after the surgeons performed a rare ‘piggy-back’ operation. The patient’s heart was size of a ‘small football’ and the donor’s heart from a brain-dead 17-year-old teenager was too small. The doctors decided to perform a rare operation in a last-ditch attempt to save his life. The doctors placed the donor’s heart without removing his original heart. The operation took place in Apollo Hospital in Hyderabad.

The doctors resorted to Plan B once cardiothoracic surgeon, A Gopala Krishna Gokhale realised it was not going to be easy to continue with the standard heart transplant surgery. As reported in the Hindu, the donor heart was of normal fist-size and the recipient’s heart was the size of a small football. This had caused the patient’s lung blood pressure to shoot up four times above normal level. Doctors cut away some part of the patient heart’s pericardium to facilitate placing the new heart. The donor’s heart was squeezed between the right lung and the original heart in a procedure that lasted seven hours. Dr Gokhale told the Hindu newspaper, “Two hearts in the patient complement each other to facilitate circulation but beat at different rates.” The patient’s blood pressure returned to near-normal levels after the operation, but he now has two pulses and a complex electrocardiogram pattern.

Man undergoing 'Piggy-back' heart transplant surgery. Video contains graphic content. Viewers discretion is advised

The procedure referred to as heterotopic or ‘Piggy-back heart transplant’ is a rare surgery which does not require removal of the deceased heart. Only about 150 such procedures have ever been reported according to Dr Gokhale. Piggy-back heart transplants were pioneered by Christiaan Barnardin, a South African cardiac surgeon in the 1970s and the average survival for the procedure is ten years.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Feb 21, 2018 05:18 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).