Second heart transplant for Hui Yi

KUALA LUMPUR: Tee Hui Yi’s body was rejecting her new heart and doctors at the National Heart Institute (IJN) were getting desperate.

Miraculously, a second donor heart became available and the 14-year-old girl got a second chance – thanks to the parents of a 20-year-old mechanic in Johor who died in a road mishap.

Hui Yi had shown signs of organ rejection after a 10-hour heart transplant surgery at the IJN which began at 1.30am on Thursday.

The first heart had come from a 15-year-old boy who was declared brain dead on Wednesday in Ipoh and the organ was harvested by IJN surgeons and brought back on a mercy flight to the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport in Subang.

On Thursday, the young mechanic Chin Yoon Keong was declared brain dead in Johor, and his father offered to donate his son’s heart to Hui Yi after having read in the newspapers about her one-year-wait for the organ.

“Hui Yi would not have made it if she had not received the second heart,” said IJN heart and lung transplant unit clinical director Dr Mohamed Izani Md Taib.

He said the IJN received an average of one donor heart in six months, but in the past one year, there was none at all.

“However, in the last two days we received two. This must be divine intervention,” he said yesterday.

When Hui Yi’s own heart began to fail, doctors at IJN had put her on a mechanical heart device which could only last two years.
From the day she got the the artificial heart, she had been warded at the IJN, with her mother by her side.

At the end of the first year on Sept 29, a tearful Hui Yi told pressmen at a media conference that she had been suffering frequent bouts of fever, vomiting and body ache – besides anxious, sleepless nights worrying that time was running out.

On Wednesday night, IJN assembled a team of 35 medical personnel as Hui Yi was wheeled into the operating theatre about 10.45pm, upon hearing that a heart had been harvested from a boy in Ipoh who was killed in a road accident.

Hui Yi’s heart was removed and replaced with the donor heart but unfortunately, the implanted heart failed to function, said IJN’s chief cardiothoracic surgeon Datuk Dr Mohd Azhari Yakub.

“Blood pressure was unstable even though the heart was in good condition when we procured it in Ipoh,” he said.

The symptoms pointed to her immune system rejecting the heart, said Dr Mohamed Izani, who explained that in any organ transplant, despite the matching blood type, there was a 5% to 10% chance of rejection.

“When we heard that there was a second donor in Johor Baru and that the blood group and height of the donor match the girl’s, and because her condition was not stable, we decided to carry out the second transplant,” he said.

The same team of surgeons performed the second transplant which started at 1am yesterday and ended about seven hours later.

“Her condition is now stable and the heart’s blood pressure is satisfactory. However, her condition remains critical,” said Dr Mohd Azhari, who headed the transplant team together with Dr Mohamed Izani.