Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Dr. Dan Kusuma (far right) and the specialist team at the Northern General Hospital's angio suite.
A woman who was seen to visibly improve on the operating table moments after a near-fatal blood clot was removed from her lungs is praising Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for giving her 'another shot at life'.
Helen Foster, 58, of Hackenthorpe, is one of the first patients in South Yorkshire to benefit from a treatment to remove blood clots from the blood vessels in her lungs. The treatment, known as mechanical thrombectomy, uses a novel medical device to physically suck blood clots out from the lung.
Without the treatment, the mum-of-three was at risk of 'deteriorating rapidly', according to her doctors.
Foster started to struggle with breathlessness and mobility problems a few weeks prior to her life-saving procedure but put it down to bad seizures.
Over the next month, she continued to have difficulties and was unable to walk very far without having to catch her breath and stop for five minutes. Things then took a turn for the worse, and one evening she began to feel “incredibly unwell” with dizziness, passing out on the stairs and indicating she had pain in her lower leg – which can be a sign of a pulmonary embolism or when a blood clot gets stuck in an artery in the lung, blocking blood flow to the lungs.
She was rushed to hospital where she continued to feel seriously unwell.
Foster said: “In all my years of seizures, that’s the most ill I have felt. The chest pain was intense, and I just kept thinking ‘is this my time now?"
Given the severity of her embolism, she was offered a pioneering X-ray guided blood clot treatment which involves using image-guided technology and a mechanical device with a tiny suction cap attached to it to remove or dissolve large clots from the lungs.
The procedure, which was performed by a specialist team of radiologists with support from respiratory doctors and staff from the cardiac care unit, is carried out under local anaesthetic and normally lasts about an hour.
To access the veins, vascular interventional radiologists first make a tiny incision into the groin. Using a catheter and guided by live low-dose X-rays, the device is then pushed through the heart and into the blood vessels of the lungs. Once the pulmonary artery is reached, the mechanical device is deployed - with the large clots physically sucked out.
For Foster, the benefits could be felt in minutes, with the team saying she visibly improved moments after the clots had been removed.
“It was absolutely unreal,” said Foster. “My chest was killing, and I felt like I was going to have a heart attack, but the pressure and pain in my lung just went as they cleared one side of the clot. When they did the other side, it was like ‘whoosh’, the pain in my heart was released and my breath had come back to almost normal. It was like a miracle. I’d been given another shot at life. I’ll be forever grateful.”
Three days later, Foster was discharged home.
Dr Dan Kusuma, Consultant Vascular and Interventional Radiologist at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, said: “This is a potentially life-saving procedure which we are delighted to be offering to patients like Helen. The procedure involves close collaboration between several medical disciplines including respiratory care, cardiology, intensive care and interventional radiology. The outcomes have been quite remarkable, with patients who were quite unwell when they were referred to us improving significantly – and even visibly on the operating table – to the extent that they were able to be discharged home within 1-2 days.”
Foster, who is continuing with her recovery, said she would be eternally grateful to the staff who saved her life: “The staff throughout were patient, kind and thoughtful. The skills and practice they offered were on a phenomenal level. I can’t thank them all enough from the bottom of my heart.”
Pulmonary embolisms are the third leading cause of cardiovascular death after heart attack and stroke according to the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
