A TEAM of experts at Louis Pasteur Teaching Hospital in Košice had to cancel a kidney transplant because the car transporting the kidney crashed on the way to the hospital.
The experts were supposed to perform their 75th kidney transplant of the year in early December 2007. But the car bringing the kidney from the transplant centre at the Martin Teaching Hospital was involved in a collision in the wee hours of the morning near the village of Chminianska Nová Ves, in Prešov District, the Sme daily wrote.
The driver was treated for minor injuries at the crash site. But the box protecting the kidney was damaged, disrupting its sterilised environment.
The patient, a 55-year-old woman from Poprad, was sent home. She had waited five years for an organ from a compatible donor.
“It is unbelievably bad luck; nothing like that has ever happened to us,” said Ľuboslav Beňa, the co-ordinator of the transplant centre at the Pasteur hospital.
“Unfortunately, the patient will have to undergo further dialysis and wait again. We sent her home. Her life and health is not in immediate danger, anyway.”
The patient has a chronic kidney deficiency, which is a serious condition, Beňa said.
“There are two possibilities – either a lifetime of dialysis, or replacing the poorly working organ with a healthy one,” she said. “She has to wait for a proper donor.”
There are about 550 people waiting for a kidney transplant in Slovakia.
Over the last 20 years, almost 500 kidneys have been transplanted in Košice. In 2007, 180 patients underwent this complicated surgery, 74 of them at the Košice centre.
