Word: aorta
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...visiting Air Force officer, Dr. William Stanford, would be assisting. Stanford was responsible for hooking her up to a heart-lung machine; somehow the connection was made backward. For 15 minutes no one noticed, and instead of pumping oxygenated blood into Green, the machine drained blood out of her aorta. The resulting brain damage has left her a speechless quadriplegic living on liquid protein. (And she could live that way for 20 years because her heart surgery was successful.) The Greens sued for malpractice, and the chief surgeon on the case settled for $575,000. But the Government, which represented...
...according to some researchers, is a device that could take over temporarily for either of the two main pumping chambers of the heart, particularly the workhorse left ventricle. These assist devices shunt blood from the ventricle to a pump outside the body that sends it directly to the abdominal aorta or femoral artery to continue its natural circulation. The heart is left intact but goes on a sort of holiday, rebuilding its strength so that it can later resume its full work load. Says John C. Norman of the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, who has been working on left...
...most familiar advance dates from 1967, when surgeons performed the first bypass operation on a patient with a coronary artery blockage. In the procedure, a vein taken from the patient's leg is grafted to the aorta and to the unobstructed portion of the coronary artery, thus detouring blood around the blocked area...
...patient was Mary Gohlke, 45, a newspaper executive from Mesa, Ariz. She had been suffering from pulmonary hypertension, a condition in which high blood pressure in the vessels of the lungs impairs breathing and eventually damages the heart. Dr. Bruce Reitz and his Stanford team severed the aorta and trachea and cut through the heart's right atrium to remove the heart and lungs. "The whole thing comes out as a package," explains Reitz. Then they replaced it with healthy organs from a 15-year-old boy killed in a car accident...
...Jarvik, is made of plastic and aluminum and powered by electricity. The implant operation will be performed by Utah Surgeon William DeVries. He will cut away the heart's lower chambers (the ventricles), leaving the upper ones (the atria) intact. Then he will sew Dacron fittings to the aorta, pulmonary artery and atria. The artificial heart, actually two ventricles, is then snapped into place "like Tupperware," says DeVries. A plastic tube leads from each ventricle through openings made in the patient's abdomen to a breadbox-size console that controls the rate and pressure of air pulsed...