Despite the inclement weather affecting the country, a break in the conditions meant that the flight was able to go ahead as planned, ultimately enabling the patient to have life-saving surgery.
With helicopter flights forbidden during RCB alerts for thunderstorms, heavy rainfall, hail, and strong wind, the pilots feared that the planned delivery would be postponed. “Fortunately, it turned out the weather did not thwart our plans, and we were able to fly from Budziska to Warsaw and back,” said Robert Sitek of the Police Aviation Board.
“The flight went smoothly, and the pilots were able to make it in one-and-a-half hours,” he added. Such a route would typically take approximately four hours by ambulance.
Notoriously difficult, lung transplants must meet several criteria to be successful; among other things, they need to be adjusted to fit the dimensions of the chest, and the lungs cannot be sourced from anyone who has smoked or had a serious respiratory disease.
The lungs, which came from a donor in Lithuania, were an ideal match for the Warsaw patient. Dorota Zielińska, the transplant coordinator at the Central Clinical Hospital of the Ministry of Interior in Warsaw, said: “In the case of this man, a lung transplant was the only effective way not only to improve his quality of life, but to save it.”
The patient is expected to make a full recovery.
Last year, 98 lung transplants were made in Poland, a new national record. The helicopter transport of the lung was the first recorded aerial transit of such an organ this year.
