{"id":29,"date":"2016-05-17T02:43:11","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T02:43:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=29"},"modified":"2016-05-17T02:43:11","modified_gmt":"2016-05-17T02:43:11","slug":"world-heart-day-organ-donation-chennai-india","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=29","title":{"rendered":"Give Way, There’s a Heart on Board"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

S<\/span>ix hours. That\u2019s how long a human heart can last outside the body. For a transplant, these are the golden minutes. Medical professionals train like ultra-marathoners to cope with that kind of pressure. But before they can even hope to begin, it comes down to what K Anthony and his band of brothers can do because they have a driving license. Who would have thought a scrap of paper from the RTO would validate a life? For over 20 years, K Anthony has driven round Chennai at crazy speeds carrying beating hearts in sealed containers in the back of ambulances. Over a dozen tickers, in fact.\n\nNo matter where he starts, his destination is the Frontier Lifeline Hospital at Mogappair, in northwest Chennai, one of the few hospitals in India specialising in heart transplants. Often, Anthony hits 140 kmph on Chennai\u2019s dense roads.\n\n\u201cYou live or die in that time,\u201d says Anthony. \u201cAfter that, the heart is no good. Nor the patient. It\u2019s insane. I don\u2019t take my foot off the pedal.\u201d\n\nThe drive that made Anthony famous was the one he undertook in 2008, when 15-year-old Hitendran died in a car accident, and his parents donated his heart to a 10-year-old girl named Abirami. It was not the distance that Anthony covered, so much as the drama of heartbreak of the families concerned. TVs went live on the case. And to add to the tragedy, the girl died a day after the operation. \u201cI cried,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat else could I do?\u201d\n\nThe media celebrates the Anthonian chase every time he or his friends do a Narain Karthikeyan in the middle of the city, covering a 45-minute distance in 12.\n\n\u201cThey make it sound like some thriller movie chase.\u00a0Actually, it busts your heart,\u201d he says.\n\n\u201cThe operation theatre is waiting for you, the patient\u2019s family, and now, of course, the odd journalist with the TV camera, if he gets wind of it. But I try not to think about anything except the road ahead of my nose,\u201d he adds. Still, he appreciates the fact that people now know the ambulance driver too has a crucial role in saving a life.\n\nAnthony is 41 years old, and moves with easy confidence. When I met him, he had just finished his Sunday shift. \u201cNothing much happened today,\u201d he says, perhaps not without the slightest sense of disappointment. Anthony drives the hospital ambulance for routine emergencies, but he specialises in transporting harvested organs.\n\nAmbulance drivers work on eight-hour rotations, but they are on call around the clock. Heart transplant is a bit of a rarity in India even now, due to lack of expertise and legal sanctions. Maharashtra, for example, adopted the Centre\u2019s <\/p>Transplantation of Human Organs Act<\/a>, 2011, only last year.\n\nWhen the emergency cycle starts, Anthony is among the first to be alerted. His house, where he lives with his wife and two school-going daughters, is barely 500 metres from the hospital. He knows the importance of the equation between time and distance better than most. In a matter of minutes, he\u2019s on the spot, lights blaring, sirens ringing, pedal to the metal. This is why he never drinks. He says nobody in this line of work does.\n\nAnthony\u2019s job begins with the doctors. First a doctor from the hospital examines a patient along a few parameters to declare them brain dead, and then returns to make some tests to decide if the heart would be suitable for a transplant. Then, if the doctors okay it, two vehicles will take off. One, an ambulance with a wide range of medical facilities and two, a smaller vehicle, like a Scorpio. The heart will normally be transported in the smaller vehicle, with the doctor from the hospital who holds on to it as though it is his own life. The ambulance with the other staff and equipment follows this vehicle.\n\nAnthony\u2019s knowledge of roadways and rush hours, signals, and shortcuts is so ingrained, he barely has to acknowledge it. It\u2019s an almost clinical detachment. His moves on the road are surgically precise and just as prompt. Usually, though, the traffic works against him.\n\nOn the roads, he\u2019s found the affluent and educated middle-class to be the most insensitive. They refuse to give way. Autorickshaws move to the side, and loudly abuse those who block the path. But motorcycles and self-driven luxury cars move at their own pace, largely oblivious to the emergency. The police used to have a contemptuous attitude too, although that is changing.\n\nAt a meeting called by a city police commissioner many years ago, to explore reductions in road fatalities, the\u00a0top cop had asked ambulance drivers to spell out the difficulties they face on the ground. Anthony stood up and spoke bluntly that policemen were not cooperative and treated ambulance drivers callously. It was a proud moment for him.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s much better now,\u201d Anthony says, in his calm voice. \u201cThings became better after the Hitendran episode. The police got into action and began playing an active hand. They\u2019ve now created a green corridor through which the heart will be transported, and a police vehicle will lead\u00a0the ambulance.\u201d\n\nAnthony is a tall man, with the beginnings of a paunch. And he has quick eyes and a steady stare. When he\u2019s driving, his face is a study in concentration. After dropping out of school in the ninth standard, Anthony came to the state capital from Pudukottai, a small town in southern Tamil Nadu, looking for a livelihood. He became an ambulance driver to pay the bills, but soon came to see it as a calling. He got married around the same time that he started specialising as a driver for organ-donor vehicles, after joining Frontier Lifeline.\n

\u201cThey make it sound like some thriller movie chase.\u00a0Actually, it busts your heart.\u201d\n\nAnthony<\/cite>\n\n<\/blockquote>\nIt takes a lot to make the grade as the transporter of such precious cargo. Dedication, commitment, fast reflexes, and great temperament are some of the crucial traits that define a driver like Anthony. There are, as a hospital source said, not too many of them.\n\nAnthony was handpicked by the founder of the hospital, internationally renowned heart surgeon K M Cherian. Every ambulance driver for the hospital is personally selected by Cherian, who is 73 years old and quite a legend. \u201cAfter joining the hospital, I learnt a lot from watching him work,\u201d says Anthony. \u201cWhenever he lands in Chennai, he will drive straight to the hospital and not home. He has no Sundays either.\u201d\n\nThe Hitendran-Abirami incident cemented Chennai\u2019s reputation as a transplant hub. \u201cBut before the concept of a green corridor came into vogue, I\u2019ve transported hearts in lesser times,\u201d says Anthony. Once, he drove to Chennai from Vellore in a record 75 minutes \u2013 a distance of 140 kilometers \u2013 when the highway was just a single lane.\n\nThe Malayalam film director, Rajesh Pillai, made Traffic<\/i> in 2011 about that drive. Two years later, the film was remade in Tamil as Chennaiyil Oru Naal<\/i> (A Day in Chennai).\n\nDoes Anthony\u2019s family know that the line of work puts his own life on the line? Do they have panic attacks when he goes into an overdrive?\n\n\u201cThey don\u2019t get to know the day I drive like a maniac,\u201d Anthony says. \u201cI see to it that they are in the dark about my\u00a0heart dates. To my family, I am just a driver of a vehicle.\u201d They don\u2019t have a clear idea that he\u2019s had to help lift accident victims soaked in blood, that the way he manoeuvres, he might meet with an accident any time. But, equally, despite his discretion, he is sure his family is not fooled. \u201cWord gets around.\u201d\n\nDespite the dangers and the heart-stopping tension that\u00a0comes along with the job, Anthony is proud to be a transporter of essential organs. And his family is proud of him. The doctors, too. As one of his admiring friends, who happens to be a practitioner, describes him, \u201cAnthony is not just a driver, he is a man bridging the eternal distance between two lives.\u201d\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

K Anthony is a transporter of hearts, and he drives like the devil to deliver them on time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":30,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[37,19,38,39],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people","tag-chennai","tag-india","tag-organ-donation","tag-world-heart-day"],"yoast_head":"\nGive Way, There's a Heart on Board<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"K Anthony is a transporter of hearts, and he drives like the devil to deliver them on time.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=29\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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