(WSVN) - A California man who was admitted to the intensive care unit for heart failure was coughing so severely that doctors said he actually coughed up part of his lung.
The 36-year-old patient, whose ordeal was described in the case in the New England Journal of Medicine, was being treated at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center and had earlier received a pacemaker.
However, over the course of a week, the man had started coughing up phlegm and blood, the cough being so severe that he coughed up an intact cast of the right bronchial tree.
A 36-year-old man was admitted to the ICU with an acute exacerbation of chronic #heartfailure. After a ventricular assist device was placed & anticoagulation therapy initiated, hemoptysis developed, and he expectorated a cast of the right bronchial tree. https://t.co/QfqeqwWzXt pic.twitter.com/nXW201rjCT
— NEJM (@NEJM) December 3, 2018
“The right bronchial tree consists of three segmental branches in the upper lobe, two segmental branches in the middle lobe, and five segmental branches in the lower lobe,” the case report’s authors wrote.
The man was later taken off the intubator after he stopped coughing up blood. However, doctors said the patient died a week later from heart failure complications.
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