41-year-old man ends up with 5 kidneys after 3 transplants

After the third renal transplant surgery, a 41-year-old resident of Chennai now has five kidneys' in his body and is doing well. The patient, who underwent a third renal transplant surgery at the Madras Mission Hospital, earlier had two transplanted kidneys in his body along with his original two kidneys.

This is one of the rarest of procedures conducted on a patient, which is not common even globally. The surgery was performed on the patient on July 10 and exactly after a month during his first check-up post the operation, the doctors found that he was keeping well, and his transplanted kidney was functioning properly.

The vascular and transplant surgeon who performed the surgery on the patient, Dr Saravanan, told IANS, "There were four challenges in performing this surgery -- first, lack of space for the new kidney in the retroperitoneum; lack of width on the native blood vessels to connect the renal artery and vein; the bladder was scattered with earlier surgeries; and the patient tended to develop a lot of antibodies from the earlier surgeries and plasmapheresis (filtering the blood) had to be performed before placing the new kidney."

He also said that the reason the old kidneys have not been removed to make space for the new one is that the patient could profusely bleed and require blood transfusion and could lead to the production of antibodies and rejection of the new kidney.

The 41-year-old patient had hypertension and chronic kidney disorder (CKD) and had two earlier failed renal transplant surgeries owing to uncontrolled hypertension.

The patient had also undergone triple bypass surgery at the Madras Medical Mission Hospital three months back after he was diagnosed with coronary artery disease.

Saravanan said, "The kidney was placed high above in the abdominal cavity, right next to the intestine as opposed to the conventional approach. The transperitoneal approach (through the gut), a rare surgery, saved the day for my patient. This is an uncommon surgery and I have to see a paper published on this in India."