Word: aorta
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...Raymond had recommended a thorough bronchoscopy as soon as Sandy was six months old. The examination, at Philadelphia's Chevalier Jackson Clinic, showed a rare malformation: the aorta (great artery) leading up from the heart normally passes in front of the esophagus (gullet) and trachea (windpipe). Sandy's aorta was divided and formed a ring around the two tubes. When food distended the gullet, the windpipe was squeezed...
Since she was an eight-year-old schoolgirl in Manhattan, Helen had known that something was seriously wrong with her heart. Doctors had told her to take it easy; there was nothing much they could do about it then. Her trouble was that the by-pass between the aorta and the main artery to the lungs failed to close some time after birth. The open by-pass is vital to the fetus (fetal blood does not get oxygen from the lungs before birth), but it is harmful in later life because it puts an extra strain on the heart...
...last January for a human patient. First he cut a piece about two inches long out of the brachial artery, which supplies the arm; the arm has plenty of blood supply and would not be crippled. Then he used the borrowed segment to make a new channel connecting the aorta, the body's main artery, with the coronary sinus, the heart's main vein. He thus reversed the normal course of the blood and made it flow backward.. In effect, he turned a vein into an artery; the heart's capillaries got a new supply...
Artery Patch. A break in the aorta, the big artery leading away from the heart, is hard to repair; surgeons have tried patching with a length of metal tube, transplanted blood vessels, etc.-without great success. Dr. Charles A. Hufnagel of Harvard Medical School described a new patch that he thinks may fill the bill (it worked well on dogs). His invention: a tube of lucite, the glasslike plastic. Attached to separated ends of the aorta, a lucite patch lets the blood flow freely without clotting, becomes firmly attached to the artery, can be left in the body permanently...
...beat of a healthy heart is lūbb-dūpp: a hollow boom as the ventricles contract to pump blood, followed by the soft snap of the closing of valves to the aorta and lungs. Weak, doubled, out-of-step or extra sounds mean trouble...