Hospital treatment left this patient with cement in his heart
© Getty / NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
A man’s chest pain had an unusual cause: a ten-centimetre piece of cement in his heart, which travelled through his bloodstream after a medical procedure. The 56 year old went to the emergency room after he experienced chest pain and difficulty breathing for two days. A week earlier he had undergone a spinal procedure to treat a vertebral compression fracture, a painful condition in which part of a spine bone collapses into itself, often as a result of osteoporosis or bone weakening. The man received a kyphoplasty, where doctors inject a special type of cement into the vertebra to restore its proper height and keep it from collapsing.