LAHORE, Feb 12: The two donors as well as recipients who underwent liver transplant surgeries at the Sheikh Zayed Hospital on Friday are reportedly showing signs of recovery.

“It is no doubt a great achievement for the doctors involved in the treatment and particularly for the families of the patients who got new lives,” one of the surgeons engaged in the complicated surgeries told Dawn on Sunday, requesting anonymity.

He said the patients had come out of the critical phase of initial 24-hours of the operations owing to effective post-operative care provided to them by a team of local doctors who were involved in liver transplant, along with Indian surgeons.

The first-ever living-donor liver transplant was jointly done in the country by Indian and Pakistani surgeons, including Dr Subhash Gupta, a senior transplant surgeon at Apollo Hospital, Delhi, Dr Goyal, Dr Agrawal, Dr Alita, Dr Tariq Bangash, Dr Amir Latif, Dr Khawar Shahzad and Dr Umer Ali.

The surgeon said the Sunday’s fresh clinical reports, including LFTs, RFTs, CBC and Doppler Ultrasound clearly indicated that all the four patients had started recovering from the surgeries.

He said the patients had started taking food normally which was a major sign of their recovery.

One of the recipients, Khanumullah, a resident of tribal areas got liver tissue donation from his sister Irshad Begum while the other, Abida Parveen, was transplanted tissues of her young son Ali Mukhtar.

He said the donors would be discharged from the hospital within a week while the recipients would be there for two weeks.

He said the livers of all the four patients would regenerate in six to 10 weeks of the transplantation if they did not develop any complications.

He said the Indian doctors, who returned to their homeland on Saturday evening, expressed their gratitude for being accorded a warm welcome here.

The foreign doctors also showed their willingness to serve the ailing people of Pakistan again whenever they would be invited.