Word: aorta
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Parts of major arteries, including the biggest of all, the aorta, are far easier to deal with. They are regularly replaced or bypassed with grafts of Dacron knit such as was used in surgery on the Duke of Windsor. Electrical pacemakers to regulate or replace the beat of a faltering heart have by now been implanted under the abdominal skin of 10,000 patients, with leads to their hearts; all these devices are encased in Silastic because of its inertness...
...going under the anesthetic. Baylor University's famed surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey was scarcely listening as he performed an operation that only a few years ago would have seemed dangerous indeed. He slit open the 70-year-old duke's belly and cut down to the aorta, the body's main artery, on which he found a 4-in. section that had swollen into an aneurysm, much as an inner tube will balloon through a weakness in its rubber wall. In 67 min. of delicate surgery, Dr. DeBakey cut out the aneurysm and replaced it with...
First Hint. The blood royal is no exception to the rule that blood flowing through the arteries exerts considerable pressure and needs strong-walled vessels to keep it in place. This is especially true of the aorta, largest of all arteries. It is a three-ply tube, about one inch in diameter where it descends through the abdomen, carrying blood for the lower organs and legs. The middle layer (the "media," to anatomists) is muscle, and it is a break in this layer that leads to aneurysms. In the vast majority of cases, the first cause of the break...
...Rush. But this month the aneurysm grew rapidly. The elastic outer layer of the aorta was being stretched thinner and thinner, with increasing danger that it might burst and loose a fatal flood of blood into the abdominal cavity. Dr. Antenucci ordered X rays, which showed that the aneurysm had increased in size, and within a week had grown bigger than an orange. The beat of the blood pulsing through it could be felt by the doctor's hand. And it was in an especially dangerous location, below the branching of the kidney arteries (see diagram). It was time...
...duke's lean abdominal wall, the surgeon discovered that the aneurysm was even bigger than expected. 'The size of a small cantaloupe or large grapefruit," he reported. Instead of a simple balloon shape with a neat "stalk," it was "fusiform," with its base extending along the aorta. Worse, the wall of the aorta had eroded until it was on the point of rupturing...