A medical image left specialists astonished: a 36-year-old man managed to cough up a blood clot that retained the exact shape of the internal branches of his bronchi.
The patient was hospitalized in the intensive care unit at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center due to severe heart failure. During his hospitalization, he received treatments to help his heart pump blood and prevent clot formation.
However, he began to experience breathing difficulties and episodes of coughing up blood. During one of them, he expelled a structure that looked like a small replica of a tree: it had the branches corresponding to the right main bronchus and its divisions.
The doctors preserved the specimen and published the photograph in the New England Journal of Medicine. As they explained, coughing up clots is not entirely unusual in patients with certain conditions, but what was extraordinary was that this one came out intact and shaped like the airways.
“”Whenever a person coughs up a clot, it is always broken into several pieces”,” explained cardiothoracic surgeon Georg Wieselthaler. “”A clot is never expelled whole from the bronchus””.
The image was not simply a curiosity: it reflected the seriousness of the patient’s condition. Days later, he had to be intubated and died approximately one week later due to cardiac complications.
For the doctors, the case offered a lesson about the importance of treating heart disease promptly. Sometimes, an extraordinary image can also show how fragile the human body is.