Word: aorta
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Merchant Seaman Gerald Gormley was practically dead on arrival at Detroit's Receiving Hospital. While fighting off street-corner hoods, he had been stabbed in the back, and the knife blade had slit right through his descending aorta, the main artery that carries blood to the trunk and legs. He was losing blood so fast that his heart stopped beating while he was on the operating table. Though surgeons managed to sew up the aorta and got his heart pumping once more, seven months passed before Gormley left the hospital...
...without distress, and he complained that his legs kept "going to sleep." His blood pressure had soared to 240/140. Doctors could feel no pulse in his legs. Chief Surgeon Melvin Newman and his assistants at N.J.H. figured that their patient was suffering from a partial obstruction of his descending aorta- scar tissue, perhaps, from his knife wound...
When Dr. Newman's team operated they were startled to find not a partial obstruction but a complete blocklage of the aorta. Scar tissue was there as they had suspected, but it had evidently formed slowly, in successive layers. While it was forming, a dozen minor blood vessels on each side of the chest had had time to enlarge and supply "collateral circulation" to the lower part of the body (see diagram). Over the years, the blood vessels had quadrupled their capacity; they had shunted enough blood around the aorta block to keep Gormley alive...
...vast De Havilland Aircraft Co., an ex-mechanic who helped Sir Geoffrey de Havilland build his first biplane in 1908, later masterminded D.H.'s massive World War II output, including 7,781 Mosquitoes, the famed twin-engined plywood bombers that could hit 404 m.p.h.; of a ruptured aorta; in Hertfordshire, England...
...aneurysm of abdominal aorta...