In 2016, a Bollywood film titled “Traffic” told the story of a live heart transported to a different city by road to transplant into a film star’s daughter.
This past Friday, the scenario almost re-enacted itself in real life, as the Times of India put it.
In Mumbai’s Fortis Hospital Mulund, a four-year-old girl was waiting for a heart. In Aurangabad, a 13-year-old boy had died in a road accident, but his heart was still functional. Doctors harvested his heart for the transplant. The challenge was getting the heart to Mumbai which was 323km away.
At 1:50pm Friday, doctors at Aurangabad’s MGM Hospital packed the heart for transportation and dispatched an ambulance with it.
The ambulance crossed 4.8km in just four minutes to reach Aurangabad Airport at 1:54pm.
An aircraft took off from the airport with the heart and landed in Mumbai Airport at 3:05pm. From there, another ambulance sped off for Fortis Hospital – which lay 18km away.
Fortis Hospitals have solid reputation for successful heart transplants
The severity of the situation prompted the authorities to declare the ambulance route a “green corridor” – where all the traffic signals are manually operated are switched green for emergency medical purposes.
The ambulance covered the distance in 19 minutes.
The heart transplant was successful – just like the film – according to the Press Trust of India.
