A 44-year-old woman battling end-stage heart failure was on Sunday wheeled into an operating theatre for a transplant, only to learn that the surgery wouldn’t happen because the donated organ had been found to have thicker walls than medically recommended.

For Anima Naskar from Panchla in Howrah, it was the second time in just over a month that she had had a transplant cancelled for different reasons.

Anima, whose enlarged heart cannot pump enough blood to all her organs, had been admitted to Apollo Gleneagles Hospitals after her family received a call at 4pm on Friday. The message was that she needed to be readied for a possible heart transplant.

Champa Naskar, a 47-year-old patient with renal failure from Baruipur in South 24-Parganas, was then in a coma at Medica Superspecialty Hospital. She was declared brain dead on Saturday but her gift of life didn’t reach Anima.

“When I went to meet her after the surgery was called off, she seemed out of breath, as she usually is. She was wearing an oxygen mask and only managed to say, “Ebaro holo na (Again didn’t happen),” said Shyamal Naskar, husband of Anima.

“The last time I had got my wife hospitalised for a transplant, there was disappointment. The harvested heart that was to come from Hyderabad never arrived. This time, we were certain that the transplant would take place because she was taken into the operating theatre. But we still had no luck,” said Shyamal, who makes a living doing odd jobs.

Shyamal said he and his wife had been filled with hope when the call from Apollo came. He got Anima to the hospital by 9 the same night. When Champa was declared brain dead on Saturday, her donated heart got allotted to Apollo by the Regional Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation. Anima was to be the recipient, as planned.

According to Sushan Mukherjee, the cardiac surgeon under whom Anima had been hospitalised, she suffers from a condition called dilated cardiomyopathy that causes the heart to enlarge and decrease its capacity to pump blood. When oxygenated blood does not reach the lungs, patients suffer from fatigue at the slightest exertion.

At Medica, the procedure to harvest Champa’s heart had started at 7am on Sunday. “Anima had just been administered a medicine to optimise her cardiac parameters when a call came from the team, saying that the donor’s heart was not viable for a transplant. She was wheeled back to the intensive care unit around 8am,” a doctor said.

International medical protocol stipulates that a heart wall should have less than 1.5cm thickness for it to be fit for transplantation. “We had initially received information that the thickness of the donor’s heart wall was 1.3cm, but an echocardiogram of the open heart showed it to be 1.8cm thick. This is when we decided to call it off,” said a surgeon at Apollo.

Had Anima received a new heart, it would have been the fourth successful heart transplant in the east and the first involving a donor and a recipient from Bengal.

“My wife was a very kind person and she would have liked her organs to give someone new life,” said Champa’s husband Swapan Kumar Naskar, a state government employee.

While Anima did not receive the heart, Champa’s liver was transplanted in a 40-year-old man named Biswarup Chattopadhyay at Apollo on Sunday afternoon.

Samiran Dutta, a 51-year-old cardiac patient from Salt Lake, received an accident victim’s heart on September 24 after three previous transplant attempts in the span of a month did not work out for various medical reasons.