The New England Journal of Medicine tweeted a picture of a 6-inch blood clot coughed up in one piece by a patient Dec. 5 as part of a photo series of medical abnormalities, according to The Atlantic.
The physicians treating the 36-year-old patient who produced the clot are not certain how it emerged without breaking into pieces.
The unnamed patients was admitted into a intensive care unit at San Francisco-based University of California for heart failure and connected to a device to help increase blood flow.
"You have high turbulence inside the pumps, and that can cause clots to form inside," Georg Wieselthaler, MD, transplant and pulmonary surgeon, told The Atlantic. "So with all these patients, you have to give them anticoagulants to make the blood thinner and prevent clots from forming."
Dr. Wieselthaler said the blood clot eventually broke out of the patient's pulmonary network and solidified in the patient's bronchial tree. The patient coughed up smaller parts of the clot until the patient coughed up the whole clot "directly for the bronchial tree," from the right lung, he said.
After the patient coughed up the large clot, the patient was put on a breathing tube and underwent a separate procedure to stop the bleeding.
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