The 69-year-old Corona patient felt unwell and suffered from a variety of symptoms after the second vaccination against the virus.
Beilinson Hospital
Photography:
Joshua Joseph
Not exactly what they thought:
At Beilinson Hospital, they performed the first open-heart surgery in Israel on a 69-year-old Corona patient.
The woman developed symptoms of general malaise and weakness in the hand after receiving the second vaccine.
A few days later her condition worsened, and she suffered from confusion, disorientation, imbalance in walking, weakness in her left hand and speech disorder.
The woman thought it was a side effect of the corona vaccine and went to the Beilinson emergency room.
Upon her arrival a high fever was measured for the woman, and later on a corona examination was found positive.
But the more alarming findings were found on imaging - the woman suffered from blood clots in the brain.
To find out the source of the clots, she underwent an echocardiogram, which found a tumor inside the heart cavities.
This tumor mass was probably the source of the patient's neurological complaints, in which the left hand was weak and speech impaired.
"We understood that the tumor should be removed from the patient's heart immediately, with the understanding that the tumor may send additional emboli that could worsen her condition," explains Dr. Ram Sharoni, senior cardiac surgeon and director of the Minimally Invasive Heart Surgery Unit at Beilinson Hospital. urgent.
Since the woman has corona, we were prepared for heart surgery with the necessary protection.
The protective equipment makes it very difficult to perform heart surgery, which requires precision and extremely delicate work.
"I congratulate the operating room staff: nurses, anesthesiologists, heart-lung machine technicians and the rest of the staff, who stood for long hours with the cumbersome protective equipment and enabled this life-saving surgery."
The operation was successful, and the woman is recovering in the hospital's corona ward.
Doctors noted that "what was mistakenly defined by the woman as a side effect of the vaccine led her to a medical examination at Beilinson, where a tumor was found in her heart, and it was removed in an operation that saved her life."