A Bangladeshi woman has donated a kidney to her son, who was in an advanced stage of renal failure, just days after both recovered from Covid-19 infection at a hospital in India’s Kolkata.
According to media reports, 65-year-old Kalpana Ghosh and her 38-year-old son Uttam came from Dhaka to Kolkata's RN Tagore Hospital in January for the transplant, but doctors could not proceed as the Covid-19 lockdown soon came into effect.
Later, the mother-son duo tested positive for Covid-19 and were shifted to state-run MR Bangur Hospital for treatment due to their financial condition, the Times of India reported.
"I am very brave, Didi. I thought now that I've begun swimming, I will cross the river. I made up my mind that I will return to Dhaka with my son," Kalpana Ghosh told NDTV.
They were discharged from the hospital on June 12 after testing Covid-19 negative. After two weeks of mandatory home quarantine, the transplant surgery was conducted successfully on July 3.
"My mother's courage got us through the double blow. First there was the need to transplant her kidney, and then both of us being positive. We spent 10 days in the Covid-19 government hospital MR Bangur. Her courage gave me strength," Uttam told NDTV.
The Times of India report also identified Uttam as an employee of a private firm in Sirajganj of Bangladesh.
For doctors, too, it was a dual challenge - an organ transplant in pandemic times and on Covid-19 survivors, the media reports said.
"So far I know, this is the first case in which both donor and recipient in an organ transplant were coronavirus survivors," Nephrology Department Head Dr Deepak Shankar Ray, who conducted the transplant, told NDTV.
"In the age of despair and gloominess, this is good news. We can probably live with Covid-19, which we have to do. And we can probably perform our usual work (services) for our patients in the pandemic days too," he added.