A 2-year-old arrived at the hospital two days after falling from a motorcycle with a piece of metal lodged inside the protective sac that wraps the heart. When surgeons opened the child's chest, they found the fragment resting just beneath one of the heart's chambers, with blood pooled in the sac around it. The heart itself had not been injured.
The case appears in the September 2026 issue of the Annals of Pediatric Cardiology. It comes from cardiothoracic surgeons and anesthesiologists at Dr. D. Y. Patil Medical College, Hospital and Research Centre in Pune, India. Their title captures the near miss: "Millimeters from catastrophe: The pericardium as a lifesaving shield."
