Hyderabad, August 08: When 28-year-old IT computer engineer Sudhakar clambered his way to the reception area at a private hospital in the city, doctors were shocked to discover that the young man had suffered a massive cardiac arrest due to a blockage in the artery. Minutes later, he collapsed at the hospital lobby and was wheeled in to the cardiology department, where his pulse rate registered zero. Twenty three electric shock treatments later, doctors were reportedly on the verge of giving up, as the patient’s heart was not beating. An hour passed, and suddenly Sudhakar’s heart began to beat, taking the surgeons by surprise.
Recalling the ‘drama’ in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, Doctors MSS Mukharjee and Amit Sharma, who supervised the resuscitation procedure on the patient said the chances of the heart recovering its rhythm after being “dead” for an hour is a rare occurrence in medical records. “The moment we realised that the heart had started beating again, the patient was prepped up for an emergency angioplasty procedure,” revealed Dr C Raghu, the director of Prime Hospital group.
A device was then inserted into the patient’s heart and the blocked artery was cleared up, following which the patient was kept in a special chamber with artificial respiration to maintain his blood pressure.
Doctors explained that one of the chambers in the patient’s heart was blocked, which led to the heart attack, which the patient described as “an uneasy sensation,” which he had dismissed as a gastric pain. Then the computer engineer reportedly sought advice from his aunt in Kurnool, who is a doctor by profession, following which he managed to stumble his way across to the hospital.
Though heart attacks have normally been associated with the elderly, Dr Mukharjee claimed that “in the case of younger individuals, it has been seen that the heart often fails to compensate for a blocked blood vessel, which implies that heart attacks in younger people are often more complicated than that of older patients.” Incidentally, it was revealed that the patient had been “an occasional smoker”, albeit being otherwise healthy. Meanwhile Sudhakar, wearing a shirt and shorts walked in on his own at the conference on Friday, even as doctors were relating his case. “I advise young people to quit smoking and adopt a healthy lifestyle,” the reticent man in his late 20s said.
–Agencies–