Hours after boarding a flight from Pune in April, a 22-year-old engineer landed in the emergency department of a hospital here in an unconscious state with blood clots in his lungs and no recordable blood pressure.

Now, almost three months later, he has recovered completely. "Today, I feel absolutely fine," he said, adding that he has resumed work and is travelling. He was asked by doctors to rest and take medications for over a month. They also advised him to come for regular check ups and get diagnostic tests done.

When he was admitted to the hospital in April, a massive movement of blood clots was found from his legs' veins to the arteries of his lungs, almost clogging them completely, said Dr N N Khanna, coordinator and senior consultant, Cardiology and Vascular Services at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals.

The patient was in extreme cardiorespiratory failure and was put on life support. Both his kidneys had stopped functioning and the doctors immediately wheeled him to the cardiology operating theatre. "We performed a two-hour-long complicated procedure of sucking out blood clots from the choked arteries of the lungs and then filtering and re-transfusing the blood to the patient.

"Thereby, we cleared the lung arteries and re-established the blood circulation in lungs and heart, letting the brain, kidney and other vital organs to breath in fresh oxygenated blood and slowly recover," Dr Khanna said. In addition to this, an umbrella like device (IVC Filter) was placed in the inferior vena cava (the main vein which takes the deoxygenated blood from the lower half of the body to the right side of the heart) to prevent the recurrence of this event, said Dr Priyadarshini Pal, senior consultant at the Emergency Department in the hospital.

"This device was taken out in May. Though IVC filter has been around for some time, its usage has become prominent in treating cardiac diseases in the recent years," Dr Pal said. As his condition improved, the patient was slowly weaned off from the ventilator/life supports and hemodialysis. He was discharged in the first week of May.

Later, the doctors worked on establishing the cause of this blood clot formation. "He turned out to have multiple genetic tendencies for hyper-coagulable state of the blood. Such patients have an increased risk for blood clots developing in the arteries and veins. We have advised him to take newer oral anticoagulants to prevent its recurrence," said Dr Khanna.