Even in grief you can help,” reads a small board at the Intensive Care Unit of six Army hospitals across the country, urging relatives to donate organs of their dear departed to help others.

The “board with a silver lining”, as it is referred to by transplantation experts of the Armed Forces, invariably draws the attention of those waiting for that final confirmation of loss from doctors.

So, when war veteran Brigadier Y P Bakshi died at the Army Research and Referral Hospital here on January 5, after being shot in the head by unknown assailants at his residence in Meerut, his family approached doctors to enquire about organ donation.

The war veteran’s organs gave a fresh lease of life to three people—a serving soldier suffering from liver cirrhosis got a much needed transplant, a 14-year-old dependent of an officer received a kidney, while a civilian admitted at AIIMS got the other kidney.

“In the hour of crises, when they are waiting outside the ICU, relatives get a sense of relief when they read something that says that others can be helped even in death. The possibility of giving someone else a new life is a silver lining for families in grief,” says Col AK Seth, director of the Armed Forces Organ Retrieval & Transplantation Authority (AORTA), a nodal unit set up last year to promote and facilitate organ transplants in the armed forces.

Like most things it does, the military has a meticulous and disciplined approach to organ donation and transplantation. So, when it decided to set up AORTA, it got the basics right and studied the law thoroughly to perform transplants even in the most complicated circumstances — medico legal cases that require the consent of relatives, legal experts, the police and government hospitals, besides medical experts.

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