Document Type

Report

Department

Medicine

Abstract

A suicide bomb blast in 2013 at a distant city of Pakistan killed 84 and wounded more than 150 people. Some patients were transferred to our tertiary care hospital because of extreme load on medical services there. This patient arrived at the Aga Khan Hospital, 2 days after the bomb blast injury and underwent an orthopedic procedure. Next day, he developed sudden tachypnea, desaturation, and circulatory collapse. After initial cardiopulmonary resuscitation, he was immediately transferred to surgical intensive care unit. Based on history, echocardiography findings and patient parameters, a clinical diagnosis of massive pulmonary embolism was made and immediate thrombolytic therapy with alteplase was started. The immediate improvement in hemodynamic status was evident following 2 hours of alteplase infusion. This case also highlights the aggressiveness of resuscitation, decision making in initiating thrombolytic therapy on clinical grounds, importance of deep venous thrombosis prophylaxis, and exhaustion of health resources due to blast related mass destruction.

Comments

CASE REPORT

Publication (Name of Journal)

JCPSP : Journal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons--Pakistan

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Included in

Pulmonology Commons

Share

COinS