THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:
A young woman from Andhra Pradesh, who hovered between life and death after a complication following her termination of pregnancy, was given a new lease of life by the doctors here at KIMSHEALTH Trivandrum, a world-class multi-specialty hospital, employing extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a cutting-edge medical technique.
The 27-year-old lady, who hails from Visakhapatnam, had collapsed and was put on ventilator after she underwent medical termination of pregnancy at a local hospital. Profusely bleeding, she was rushed to KIMSHEALTH in an ambulance.
A team of KIMSHEALTH’s gynecologists, led by Dr Girija Gurudas, detected a uterine rupture, which was surgically corrected immediately. However, the patient’s blood pressure kept on falling. An echo test revealed that the pumping of heart had slowed down. Due to the intense physical and emotional stress, the patient ended up in stress cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscles that makes it harder for the heart to pump blood to the rest of the body effectively. It can subsequently lead to heart failure.
Doctors administered high doses of medicine, but it was not yielding results and the patient was sinking to a multi-organ failure with renal shutdown. It was then that the doctors decided to employ the ECMO procedure. KIMSHEALTH is the only ECMO center in Kerala to have done 50-plus ECMO procedures with a success rate of above 70 per cent which is at par with international standards.
Explaining the procedure, Dr Shaji Palangadan, Senior Consultant and HOD in Cardiothoracic & Vascular Surgery at KIMSHEALTH, said, “ECMO is an extracorporeal technique of providing prolonged cardiac and respiratory support to persons whose heart and lungs are unable to provide an adequate amount of support or function to sustain life. It is a treatment that uses a pump to circulate blood through an artificial lung back into the bloodstream of a critically ill person. This system provides heart-lung bypass support outside of the body.”
Keeping in view that critical life support was needed, the patient’s sternum was opened and the ECMO machine was connected to the major blood vessel of the heart for taking over the function of heart and lung. On the third day, the lady’s condition improved and the ECMO machine was connected to the blood vessels on the limbs while the sternum (breastbone) was closed to reduce the risk of infection due to prolonged exposure.
On the sixth day, the patient recovered and ECMO was removed. The lady was subsequently fully nursed back to health. Previously also, ECMO had been used at KIMSHEALTH with great success on patients who faced life-threatening medical conditions. These included a child with an acute snakebite, a patient who tried to commit suicide and a person who nearly drowned.
The team included Cardiac Surgeons Dr Shaji Palangadan and Dr Vijay Thomas Cherian, Cardiac Anaesthetist Dr Subhash, Cardiologist Dr Hashir Kareem, ID Specialist Dr Rajalekshmi, Intensivist Dr Deepak and Dr Murali, Gynecologists Dr Girija Gurudas, Dr Roshni Ambat and Dr Sajith Mohan, Perfusionists and Nurses.
