Mira Road: Hospital Gives Fresh Lease Of Life To 34-year-old

A team headed by Dr Tushau Prasad, Consultant Emergency Physician at Wockhardt Hospitals, Mira Road gave a fresh lease of life to a 34-year-old patient with collapsed lung due to a condition called pneumothorax. This condition leads to air trapping in the chest, compressing the heart and causing respiratory distress. The patient was saved with timely intervention in the first hour after the trauma. He can breathe freely now and has been discharged from the hospital.

A security guard at the hospital alerted the emergency room (ER) when he saw a patient, a resident of Mira Road, a businessman by profession coming out of an auto-rickshaw with clothes drenched in blood, holding his right upper chest. He looked like he was badly injured due to a stabbing in the chest. The patient was immediately taken to a triage bed.

Prasad, said, “In our initial assessment we came to know that his airway was clear since he could speak full sentences but he didn’t have any breath sounds on the right side of his chest. His X-Ray revealed that there was an air-trapping happening under the skin on the right side. We realized that it was a traumatic chest injury wherein the stabbing object had penetrated through the chest wall hurting blood vessels and with its tip injuring the pleura, contributing to developing of pneumothorax.”

Prasad added, “The patient was put on oxygen support first and then a needle decompression of the chest cavity was done. The patient was also put on blood transfusion because the blood pressure was critically low that is 67/42 mmHg and the patient had lost significant blood. Slowly, his BP came to normal range, and his breathing improved. Later, his CT scan showed a remarkable improvement. After a short stay of 4 days, the patient was discharged with complete recovery."

It is the need of the hour to treat trauma patients like him in the first hour which is known as golden hour management. The first 3 steps of trauma evaluation involve evaluation, recognition, and intervention of potential injuries to the chest. Following a routine method of TRAUMA PROTOCOL evaluation reduces missed injuries. Injuries to the heart and lungs are usually serious, and early diagnosis is vital since they have the highest mortality if missed.