He is a man born again. That¡¯s how friends of Satish Kumar, who works in a steel factory of Sikandrabad in UP, describe the 35-year-old who recently underwent surgery to remove a metallic object that got lodged in his heart.
August 9 was just another usual day at work. Kumar was drilling into iron at his factory. Just then, a part of it that was nearly four centimetres long, snapped and hit him on the chest like a bullet fired from a gun. Before anyone could realise what happened, Kumar was lying on the ground with blood gushing out of his chest.
Scans done at a local hospital revealed that the iron shard had penetrated the chest wall, damaged the lungs and got lodged in the right chamber of the heart.
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His life had been saved by a whisker. The shard had missed the main artery supplying blood to the heart by a few millimetres, saving Kumar from instant death. Also, since the metal was lodged in the heart, it stopped haemorrhage that could be fatal.
But that didn¡¯t mean that Kumar could survive it without immediate surgery to remove the shard. His colleagues said three hospitals in Sikandrabad and Ghaziabad refused to operate. But cardiac surgeons at Fortis hospital, Noida, said they would take a chance.
¡°In my 15 years of service, I had never seen or heard about such a case. But we decided to try because the patient couldn¡¯t wait any longer. He had spent five hours running around different hospitals already and was bleeding profusely,¡± Dr Vaibhav Mishra, additional director and head, Cardio-Thoracic and Vascular Surgery at Fortis Noida told TOI.
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Around 12.30pm, Kumar was wheeled into the operation theatre where a team of doctors cut open his chest and removed the metal that was deeply embedded in the muscles with the help of special instruments.
Normally, surgeons stop the heart and use a heart and lung machine to send blood around the body. But it is fraught with risks such as stroke so, Mishra said, they decided to remove the object and repair the heart while it was still beating.
¡°Removing the object with precision and suturing it while it was beating was the toughest part of the surgery. A tiny mistake could be fatal. But we succeeded,¡± Mishra said.
A month hence, the father of four is fit and working again. ¡°My colleagues can¡¯t believe I¡¯m alive,¡± Kumar said.