CHENNAI: Jaysukhbai Thaker’s life would have ended on a stretcher after he suffered a cardiac arrest that stopped his heart for 45 long, decisive minutes. But this is precisely the time it took for a special team of doctors at Fortis Malar Hospital to revive the 38-year-old, who was technically “dead”.
And this revival process was just as intensive as ensuring his survival using a complex procedure termed ‘Extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ (ECPR) that kept the brain protected during his cardiac arrest. Jaysukhbai was airlifted from his hometown in Porbandar for a possible transplant as he had been suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy, a heart muscle disease that spells slow degradation, leading to end-stage heart failure.
The ECPR procedure was only administered after repeated failed attempts at getting his heart to pump. By this procedure, which doesn’t have too many specialised on-call teams in any other hospital, the patient was supported with a portable heart and lung machine.
“From the cardiologist’s point of view, ECPR is a wonderful life-saving procedure, but under-utilised in the cathlabs and coronary care units due to various logistics problems. We have now taken the lead in this very critically useful area and this is the first hospital to start this in a formal manner for cardiac arrest patients,” said Ravikumar, intervention cardiologist.
K G Rao, a member of the panel of doctors from Fortis Malar, said that ECPR, though highly specialised, improves chances of cardiac complications by 70-80% and that the CPR committee at the hospital will be trying to enhance its use of ECPR.
The director at the hospital’s Centre for Heart Failure and Transplant, Dr K R Balakrishnan, who led the procedure that revived the patient (completely recovered now) remarked that the process was technically difficult but it is a promising new technology in situations deemed to be fatal.