In a shocking incident, a man whose heart beat stopped for 45 minutes after he suffered a cardiac arrest woke up. Jaysukhbai Thaker’s life would have ended on a stretcher, but surprisingly he was alive even after his heart beat stopped for 45 minutes. But this is precisely the time it took for a special team of doctors at Fortis Malar Hospital to revive the 38-year-old, who was technically “dead”.

This revival process was just as intensive to ensure his survival using a complex procedure termed ‘Extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ (ECPR) that kept the brain protected during his cardiac arrest. Jaykhbai was from Porbandar and he was airlifted for a possible transplant as he had been suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy. It is a heart muscle disease that leads slow degradation and heart failure.

Doctors attempts of ECPR failed many times to get his heart pump back. By this procedure, which doesn’t have too many specialised on-call teams in any other hospital, the patient was supported with a portable heart and lung machine.

“From the cardiologist’s point of view, ECPR is a wonderful life-saving procedure, but under-utilised in the Cath labs and coronary care units due to various logistics problems. We have now taken the lead in this very critically useful area and this is the first hospital to start this in a formal manner for cardiac arrest patients,” said Ravi Kumar, intervention cardiologist.

Though ECPR is a highly specialised process, it improves chances of cardiac complications by 70-80%. The director at the hospital’s Centre for Heart Failure and Transplant, Dr K R Balakrishnan, who led the procedure that revived the patient (completely recovered now), remarked that the process was technically difficult but it is a promising new technology in situations deemed to be fatal.