Some stories make you stop scrolling. This is one of them. Two toddlers from the Philippines, just shy of two years old, walked into a Delhi hospital carrying the same rare disease, and walked out with new lives, thanks to two family members who gave up a piece of themselves. According to ANI, Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals in New Delhi has now completed its first-ever paediatric twin liver transplant, out of 645 such surgeries performed there so far.
A rough start in life
Tyler and Kelly weren’t dealt an easy hand from day one. Born premature, weighing just 2 kg and 2.4 kg, they arrived into a family that had already lost one infant before them. So there was already a weight to this pregnancy before either twin took their first breath. Within two weeks, both babies turned yellow with jaundice and their stools went pale, a sign doctors don’t take lightly in newborns. Tests found something almost nobody sees twice in one family: Choledochal Cyst Type IVA, a rare defect where the bile ducts swell up and slowly wreck the liver if nothing’s done. Both twins had it. Both were heading toward liver failure.For months, the babies went through the kind of ordeal no toddler should know: internal bleeding, fluid building up in the belly, weight that wouldn’t budge, hospital stay after hospital stay. Eventually, transplant became the only option left on the table. But finding one living donor is hard enough. Finding two, for two siblings, within days of each other, is rare enough that most hospitals never see it. The twins’ father wanted to donate but wasn’t medically fit to. So their mother stepped up for one child, and the mother’s brother, the twins’ maternal uncle, stepped up for the other.
The surgery, in the surgeon’s own words
Dr Neerav Goyal, who heads liver transplant surgery at the hospital, told ANI that doctors harvested twenty per cent of the liver from both the mother and the uncle. He explained this condition shows up in roughly one in 100,000 children, and only a tenth of those cases ever progress to needing a transplant. Both children, he said, “are now healthy and can lead normal lives,” helped along by the fact that a donated liver actually grows back, in both the person who gives and the one who receives.
What made this one different
Dr Anupam Sibal, the hospital’s Group Medical Director, pointed out that this was the first time in 645 paediatric liver transplants that twins needed the surgery together, and that both babies were small enough to make it riskier still. The hospital’s managing director, Shivakumar Pattabhiraman, added that a family had travelled all the way from the Philippines and put their trust in this team.Tyler and Kelly are home now. And the story behind them, of a mother, an uncle, and a father who held the whole family together while it happened, is the part worth remembering long after the medical details fade.