Google – AFP, 19 August 2013
File photo
shows two doctors in an operating room at a US hospital on
June 26, 2012
(AFP/File, BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI)
|
SYDNEY, New
South Wales — An Australian woman has lived to tell the tale after being
brought back to life from being clinically dead for 42 minutes, doctors said on
Monday.
Mother-of-two
Vanessa Tanasio, 41, was rushed to Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne last week
after a major heart attack, with one of her main arteries fully blocked.
She went
into cardiac arrest and was declared clinically dead soon after arrival.
Doctors
refused to give up and used a compression device called a Lucas 2 -- the only
one of its kind in Australia -- to keep blood flowing to her brain while
cardiologist Wally Ahmar opened an artery to unblock it.
Once
unblocked, Tanasio's heart was shocked back into a normal rhythm.
"(I
used) multiple shocks, multiple medications just to resuscitate her,"
Ahmar said.
"Indeed
this is a miracle. I did not expect her to be so well."
Tanasio
said she had no history of heart conditions and was grateful to be alive.
"I
remember being on my couch, then the floor, then arriving at hospital, and then
two days go missing," Tanasio said.
"I was
dead for nearly an hour and only a week later I feel great. It's surreal."
The Lucas
device physically compresses the chest, like during cardiopulmonary
resuscitation (CPR), allowing doctors to work non-stop to put a stent into a
blocked artery.
It is the
first a time a patient has successfully used the device, which was donated to
the medical centre, for such a length of time in Australia, the hospital said.
Clinical
death is a medical term for when someone stops breathing and their blood stops
circulating.
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