Yahoo News Sheffield 'miracle' mum 'so close to death' felt better minutes after game-changing treatment
A Sheffield mum says she has been given ‘another shot at life’ after a near-fatal blood clot was removed from her lungs.
Doctors say Helen Foster, 58, from the Hackenthorpe area of the city, visibly improved on the operating table, and she has since praised the team at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust for saving her life.
She 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”, her doctors said. Helen 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. 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. “In all my years of seizures, that’s the most ill I have felt,” Helen said. “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 a 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,” said Helen, “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."
Adding: "I’d been given another shot at life. I’ll be forever grateful."
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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, who is continuing with her recovery, 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.”
