Pune: A 21-year-old Solapur woman will become the first in the country to undergo an uterus transplant in Pune on Thursday. The woman, who suffers from congenital absence of uterus since birth, will be fitted with her mother's womb so that she can conceive normally.Pune's Galaxy Care Laparoscopy Institute (GCLI), where the surgery will be done, has been granted a licence by the state's Directorate of Health Services to carry out the uterus transplant. "It will be an eight-hour suegery. The recipient will remain in ICU for a week and another two weeks in general care. During this period, the transplanted uterus will be studied almost every day," said oncosurgeon Shailesh Puntambekar, who will perform the surgery.Though the surgery is being planned since months, doctors had to scramble for a last-minute permission from a district-level committee on Wednesday. "Since it is live donor uterine surgery, we have to seek permission from a committee at Sassoon Hospital in Pune. The committee holds meeting on the first and third Wednesday every month. Hence the last-minute scramble," said Puntambekar.The committee verified all documents of the donor and recipient's and interviewed their relatives to establish relationships and consents. The panel also assessed whether the surgery is really indicated or validated.Doctors have already extracted and cryo-preserved eight eggs (ovum) from the woman's normally functioning ovary, which will be implanted in the transplanted uterus eight months after the complex surgery. The immediate success of the surgery will be assessed after three weeks following multiple doppler and sonography studies to see whether the transplanted uterus has regular blood flow and functions normally.For the transplant, besides the usual pre-operative protocols, the recipient has been made to undergo ovulation stimulation by pre-planned IVF for oocyte (egg) retrieval. The frozen embryos have been prepared and kept ready for implantation, if and when the transplant becomes successful. Simultaneously, a course of immunosuppressants has been started to bring down chances of rejection of the transplanted uterus. The donor too has been prepped for a hysterectomy.Post-transplant, the woman, whose husband runs a smallscale industry in Solapur, will stay in the hospital for three weeks. After that, she will be monitored every month. Doctors will reduce the immunosuppressants' dose post-transplant and around this time, they will initiate implantation of the extracted eggs into the transplanted womb. "After she conceives and delivers a baby, and the child is about a year old or so, we will remove the transplanted uterus so that she does not have to take the immunosuppressants (anti-rejection drugs)," said Puntambekar. The donor will remain in ICU for two days and then be discharged.On Friday, another woman, a Baroda resident (24), who suffers from dysfunctional uterus, too will undergo a womb transplant. She too will get a womb from her mother. The much-debated surgery is attempted world over with limited success. Around 25 surgeries have been attempted world over, but less than 10 successful post-transplant pregnancies are known.

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