A 36-year-old man who was suffering from chronic heart failure shocked doctors when he coughed up a blood clot closely resembling the bronchial tree in his right lung in late November.
Georg Wieselthaler, a transplant and pulmonary surgeon at the University of California at San Francisco told the Atlantic: “We were astonished. It’s a curiosity you can’t imagine—I mean, this is very, very, very rare.”
Per the New England Journal of Medicine, the man was an ICU patient at the University of San Francisco Medical Center being treated for end-stage heart failure.
During the week of the patient's hospitalization, the man had periodic episodes of coughing, which progressed to one extreme coughing fit when he suddenly expelled the unusual clot.
After being supplied oxygen via a tube, the man's coughing ceased two days later, leading to the removal of the tube. Unfortunately, even though the coughing ceased, his health took a turn for the worse.
Despite the doctor's best efforts and the assistance of a ventrical device, the man died from heart failure a week later.
The source of information in this article has been provided largely in part to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine.