Man lives after 15 cardiac arrests in quick succession

KALYAN: Surviving one cardiac arrest is rare, but 57-year-old Dombivli resident Ramchandra Chavan survived 15 before undergoing an emergency angioplasty.
Chavan, a long-time patient of diabetes and kidney disease, started experiencing a dull ache in his chest on a September morning in 2013. He got progressively worse and in the afternoon he collapsed with a heart attack, remember his family members.The family’s medical trauma worsened thereafter. En route to the hospital and even while being wheeled into the cath lab for an angioplasty, Chavan kept getting cardiac arrests. The case has just come to light within the wider medical fraternity, amazing doctors.
Cardiac arrests are electrical imbalances in the heart’s circuit that affect blood circulation throughout the body. Heart attacks, on the other hand, are caused by blockages in an artery and may not always be fatal.
Cardiologist Dr Zakia Khan, who removed the culprit blood clot in Chavan’s arteries on that fateful day, said she had never come across any patient who had survived 15 cardiac arrests. “Usually, one hears of patients getting a couple or up to five arrests,” she said, adding that he is a patient who beat all odds given his medical history.
Chavan was first taken to a local clinic, but the emergency injections didn’t help much as he kept going into cardiac arrest state. His family then transferred him to Fortis Hospital in Kalyan, where doctors decided to perform an angioplasty on him.
En route to the hospital, Chavan again suffered an arrest and had to be resuscitated with electric shocks before his heart started again. In fact, when he was wheeled into the hospital’s emergency room, his vital signs were flat-lined.
Even during the surgery, Chavan suffered another cardiac arrest. “After a week’s stay in hospital, Chavan’s condition improved substantially and he was considered good enough to be discharged,” said Dr Khan.
But a senior cardiologist said it’s difficult to count the number of times a patients goes into cardiac arrest. “You are too busy trying to revive him to keep a count, but it’s safe to say that God was kind in this patient’s case if he suffered 15 arrests.”
Chavan’s son Rohan said, “It was really a miracle for us as we had lost hope that my father would be alive.”