Life Saver
Immediately, William Moulton recognized the serious signs on a fall 2016 day.
“I went to get up to put the dishes in the sink, and my left arm went numb,” says the now-68-year-old Ravenna resident. “My left leg was beginning to act numb.”
Moulton, who had a stroke around 1993, could sense he was having another one and rushed to the emergency room at University Hospitals Portage Medical Center in Ravenna. They confirmed he was having a stroke. He had an abnormal CT scan calcium score, which usually indicates cholesterol plaque formation in the heart arteries with possible blockages. A heart catheterization confirmed a significant blockage in his left anterior descending coronary artery.
Dr. Anjan Gupta, an interventional cardiologist with University Hospitals Harrington Heart & Vascular Institute, performed a life-saving angioplasty and stent placement to open the blockage. Moulton became one of the first patients to get that procedure at UH Portage Medical Center’s interventional cardiology lab, which eliminates the need for patients to be transferred to Akron or Cleveland. Gupta put a catheter with a balloon and stent through an arm artery, guiding it to the blockage. He blew up the balloon, which broke the plaque in the artery. Gupta inserted a stent, which is like a tiny spring, into the heart artery.
“The stent gets lined by the normal lining of the blood vessels,” says Gupta. “It becomes a part of the body that prevents the area from collapsing again.”
Moulton felt great until 2021 when he was recovering from back surgery. A nurse found his blood pressure spiked to 200, and he was having leg pain and increasingly struggling to breathe.
“I was puffing like a freight train,” he recalls.
An EMS squad hurried to him, deployed supplemental oxygen and raced him to the ER, where he saw Gupta.
“I said, Boy, am I glad to see you!” Moulton recalls.
Through a CT scan, doctors discovered a pulmonary embolism, in which there are blood clots in the lungs. When patients aren’t very mobile after surgery, blood clots can form in the legs and travel through the heart into the lungs and block blood flow to the lungs.
“That is a very dangerous thing because when circulation to the lung is cut off, the heart is stunned,” says Gupta. “You can die.”
Gupta performed a pulmonary embolectomy to remove blood clots using a catheter going from the groin area to the lungs. It used vacuum pressure to suck out the clots. While Moulton required 100 percent supplemental oxygen upon his arrival, he didn’t need any supplemental oxygen when he left.
Moulton is happy the cath lab can help more local patients like him and couldn’t be more thankful to Gupta.
“The guy saved me twice,” he says. “That’s a big feat!” KP