In Lviv, doctors have for the first time performed a heart transplant on a child within the walls of the St Nicholas Children’s Hospital of the First Medical Association of Lviv. The donor organ for the 12-year-old boy was the heart of a 10-year-old girl who died in a road traffic accident.
The posthumous donor was a 10-year-old child who was declared brain dead by doctors following a road traffic collision. Despite their devastating loss, the girl’s parents consented to posthumous organ donation, and it turned out that her heart was a match for a boy named Nazar.
In 2023, Nazar Mazur from Vinnytsia region was diagnosed with leukaemia, and on the same day his mother Anastasiia was found to have thyroid cancer. At that time, the boy’s father was serving at the front. After Nazar began chemotherapy in Vinnytsia, during a short break in treatment he was admitted to intensive care with severe Covid pneumonia, when his lungs were functioning at only 10%.
Against this background, the boy’s heart was severely affected: it became enlarged, lost its ability to fully pump blood, and his ejection fraction fell to a critical 10%, causing shortness of breath even at rest. Doctors made a new diagnosis — dilated cardiomyopathy — and only an urgent heart transplant could save his life.
The heart transplant operation for Nazar was jointly carried out by cardiac surgeons of the First Medical Association of Lviv: the head of the paediatric cardiac surgery department at St Nicholas Hospital, Oleksandr Yachnik, and the head of the heart and vascular centre at St Panteleimon Hospital, Roman Domashych. The surgery lasted three hours, and the boy’s new heart started beating while he was still on the operating table.
Nazar is now walking along the hospital corridors without shortness of breath and feels well. His mother, Anastasiia, thanks the donor’s family every day for their decision at a moment of loss and stresses how important it is that people are informed about the possibilities of transplantation.
The boy is once again making plans for the future: he dreams of becoming President of Ukraine and helping children, and above all of returning to his home town of Ladyzhyn to enjoy his favourite grilled cheese lavash.
The Transplantation Centre of the First Medical Association of Lviv recalls that for five years in a row it has remained the leader in Ukraine in terms of the number of transplants performed, thanks to which hundreds of patients have been given a chance of a full life.