Frederick Chen, MD, chief of surgery at Tufts, told The Boston Globe, that the huge surgical undertaking wasn’t ideal, but it is the duty of the hospital to make transplant surgeries work for patients as hearts become available.
“It was a very busy day,” Gregory Couper, MD, a Tufts cardiac surgeon, told The Boston Globe. “We didn’t want our patients to lose out on transplants that could be a once-in-a-lifetime offer.”
Dr. Couper said heart transplant procedures require two surgeries, one to remove the donor organ, and a second to implant the donor organ into the recipient. At most, there is a four or five hour window between the two surgeries, he said. One patient who received a heart transplant due to a condition called cardiomyopathy, also had surgery to receive a donor kidney the same day, according to The Boston Globe.
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