A bad case of heartburn
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You would think that your day couldn’t get much worse than having to undergo emergency surgery. That’s a pretty rough time, no matter what. But for a 60-year-old man receiving a repair of an ascending aortic dissection, his doctors managed to add insult to a very serious injury: They lit a fire inside their patient.
According to a case study presented at the 2019 Euroanaesthesia Congress in Vienna, it all started with the patient’s history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Bullae in the lungs caused by the disease were stuck to the sternum, and during an attempt to separate the lung from the sternum, a bulla was punctured, causing an air leak. To compensate, the surgeons boosted the proportion of oxygen to 100%.
In retrospect, what happened next almost seems predictable. A spark from the electrocautery device ignited a dry surgical pack, and with the assist of that extra oxygen, the doctors immediately had a fire on their hands, localized within their patient’s chest cavity. We believe this is what the medical community calls a “complication.”
To the surgeons’ credit, the fire was extinguished immediately, and after they presumably took a break to change into clean underwear, the rest of the operation went without incident. Though we imagine the patient was a bit confused when he woke up to the smell of barbecue.
