'I was so close to death, but I was saved by a miracle treatment'

Helen Foster
-Credit: (Image: Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust)


A mum says it was "like a miracle" after groundbreaking treatment saved her from a near-fatal blood clot. Helen Foster, 58, was rushed into hospital with intense chest pain where she was found to have a clot on her lungs.

However, she says she has been given "another shot at life" after undergoing a novel X-ray-guided procedure. Helen, from South Yorkshire, was one of the first patients in the county to benefit from the treatment, known as mechanical thrombectomy, where a medical device is used to physically suck blood clots out from the lung.

Without the treatment, the mum-of-three Helen was at risk of "deteriorating rapidly" her doctors say. But instead she visibly improved on the operating table, and she has now praised the team at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals for saving her life.

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Helen, from Sheffield, started to struggle with breathlessness and mobility problems a few weeks prior to her life-saving procedure but put it down to bad seizures, Yorkshire Live reports.

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. She then passed out on the stairs and complained of pain in her lower leg.

She was rushed to hospital where she continued to feel seriously unwell. She 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?'"

Doctors said the lower leg pain is often 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.

Tests confirmed that Helen had suffered from an embolism. Due to its severity, she was offered the pioneering X-ray-guided blood clot treatment which involves using 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.

For Helen, the benefits could be felt in minutes, with the team saying she visibly improved just moments after the clots had been removed. "It was absolutely unreal," she said.

"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" she added.

Three days later, Helen was discharged and allowed to return 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."

Helen, from the Hackenthorpe area of Sheffield, is continuing with her recovery. She said she will 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."