Back From the Dead! Man Revived After Heart Stops For 45 Minutes

For 45 minutes a team of four doctors worked hard to revive him.

Gujarat-based Jaysukbhai Thaker lay motionless on a hospital table in Chennai after a massive cardiac arrest.

Code Blue, Code Blue, Code Blue was blaring on the hospital floor. Even if you aren’t familiar with Grey’s Anatomy lingo, you must know this is hardly a code. It means a patient is dying.

The 37-year-old patient suffered from an end stage genetic disorder which was slowly decreasing his heart’s ability to pump blood. A week before the miraculous episode where doctors brought him back from the dead, he was admitted in Fortis hospital, Chennai for a possible heart transplant.

Two months ago, one day his blood pressure suddenly dipped, heart stopped beating, he turned pale and cold. In a jiffy the ward went in Code Blue. Four doctors including a respiratory therapist, a nurse desperately tried to revive him with CPR (cardio pulmonary resuscitation) for 45 minutes.

And then there was a slight flutter and the heart started beating.

At the extreme right -Jaysukhbhai and his wife with the team of doctors who saved him (Photo courtesy: Fortis Hospital)

Miracles like these are rare. Even in a hospital setting there is a 15% possibility of survival after a cardiac arrest. If he was not admitted, his chances of being alive today would be zero. 

Dr Suresh Rao, Chief of Cardiac Anesthesia and Critical Care, Fortis Chennai

With less than 10% of his heart working, the ordeal was far from over.

From Hopeless To Hope In an Instant - Multiple Cardiac Arrests But Patient Walks Out Alive!

According to the American Heart Association, timely CPR can triple the chances of survival. Most people don’t survive a cardiac arrest in India, because rarely anyone knows how to perform CPR (Photo: iStock)

Jaysukhbhai was immediately shifted to the ICU and that’s when he suffered another heart attack. This time though, doctors put him on a portable heart-lung bypass machine called ECMO and CPR was still being carried out.

The ECMO machine acts like an artificial heart outside the body. It takes in blood from the body and pumps back oxygenated, purified blood back in. This machine increases the chances of survival by 60%.

Dr Suresh Rao, Chief of Cardiac Anesthesia and Critical Care, Fortis Chennai

We have increasingly started using this technique, ECMO and CPR, for “in hospital” cardiac arrest cases with very good results. In fact world over, these two lifesaving techniques in combination are used only in Japan, San Diego and Taiwan. 

Dr K.R. Balakrishnan, Director, Cardiac Sciences, Fortis

For the next ten days, Jaysukh was kept on this machine which functioned like his heart. But ECMO cannot be continued indefinitely. For his family, this time was a harrowing blur. Tubes, pumps and drugs kept his fragile body alive till a Hyderabad-based hospital arranged a matching donor heart and he underwent a successful heart transplant.

Two months later, Jaysukh has now fully recovered and ready for discharge.

Life After Being Back From the Brink

4 out of 5 cardiac arrests happen at home. Statistically speaking, if you know how to perform CPR in an emergency, the life you save is likely to be someone at home: a child, a spouse, a parent or a friend (Photo: iStock)

Despite his miraculous escape, doctors say that Jaysukh will have a near-normal life from now on. In his case, poor lifestyle, obesity or other related diseases weren’t an issue but it was the genetic condition with his heart which led him to the brink.

Jaysukh will now have to be on heavy immunosuppressants, those are pills which ensure his body doesn’t reject the new heart, for the rest of his life. The current survival rate after a heart transplant is an average of 7 years, as reported by the Cleaveland Clinic, US.

Since this is a fairly new procedure in India with only a few hospitals in metropolitan cities equipped to carry out heart transplants, there are no such survival statistics for India.

Complications From Immunosuppressants

In the first six months after a heart transplant chances of rejection of the organ is maximum. During this period, heavy doses of antibiotics and immuno-suppressants are given to the patient.

Though the quality of life after a heart transplant is good, a big complication of long-term immuno-suppressants is that it increases the risk of skin cancer and lymph gland tumours. About one in ten transplant patient commonly develops a form cancer.

But the truth is, you can never predict how things turn out with that kind of downtime. What Jaysukh has suffered and come out of alive is the stuff of soap operas!

Perhaps a sardonic reply from Dr Gregory House will sum up the situation:

Dr House from the successful American medical drama, House M.D.

Also Watch: Watch: 7 Amazing Facts About Your Heart

(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)

Access to all paywalled content on site
Ad-free experience across The Quint
Early previews of our Special Projects

And more membership benefits!

Continue

Published: undefined

SCROLL FOR NEXT