Despite orders that prohibited movement of vehicles across state lines during the Cauvery crisis, a team of doctors from Bengaluru transported a 55-year-old diabetic patient from Karnataka to Tamil Nadu for a liver transplant, crossing the border on foot.
The patient from Nagpur had waited for two years when his doctors heard of a possible donor, this week, The Times of India reported. A man, who had suffered from head injuries, was declared brain dead at a hospital in the city of Salem in Tamil Nadu on Wednesday.
A Olithselvan, the doctor who led the team, told TOI that the four-hour long journey from Bengaluru to Salem, undertaken post midnight on Thursday, "seemed like an eternity, a travel across two nations."
"With the recipient, we travelled in a Karnataka-registered ambulance till the Tamil Nadu border. There, we hopped off the vehicle. Left with no option, we tore off the wheelchair fixed to the ambulance, made the recipient sit on it and wheeled it for a kilometer in the darkness till we crossed the border and reached a T.N. registered ambulance waiting for us," Olithselvan told the newspaper.
"The 30-minute walk seemed endless. The cops manning the border were left dumbstruck," he said.
The patient is recovering after a 12-hour-long surgery.
Also on HuffPost India: