Word: aortic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Denver's National Jewish Hospital showed that her heart's left ventricle had become enlarged by having to pump against the resistance of a narrowed aorta. She was too ill for an operation then. Even more disturbing, the doctors diagnosed Ro Anne's aortic abnormality as a form in which the great artery is narrowed just above the point where it leaves the heart, close to the aortic valve. This is such a rare condition* that in the U.S. only a scant half-dozen operations had been done to correct...
...enough. On operation morning, Ro Anne got a general anesthetic. Then she was put in an ice bath. After 15 minutes, her temperature had dropped about 6° F. She was taken out of the bath and Dr. Newman opened her chest. The surgeons saw the rare type of aortic narrowing they had expected, and decided to correct it by putting in a patch. They inserted tubes in the great veins near her heart and in a thigh artery, to hook her up to a heart-lung machine...
...clamps on the aorta both above and below the constriction. Dr. Newman made an inch-long cut in the aorta's wall and stitched in a plastic (Teflon) gusset, two-thirds of an inch wide at the base. This made the great artery a uniform width from the aortic valve to its big bend. Ro Anne's temperature hit a low of 77°, then a double electric shock restarted her heart. The pump-cooler was disconnected, and Ro Anne's chest was closed. For the first time in her life, her blood had a normal, unobstructed...
...Aurora was starting back to school after a speedy recovery from the same sort of surgery. And Patricia had a similar medical history: first a heart murmur, then gradually failing strength until an operation seemed unavoidable. But to the surgeons who opened her chest two years ago, her aortic narrowing seemed inoperable. Last summer Patricia went to Dr. Arthur E. Prevedel, 44, who put her into Children's Hospital in Denver. He worked plastic tubes through arm veins into both sides of her heart, injected a radiopaque dye and took X rays to get a clear picture...
...Technically known as supravalvular aortic stenosis; not to be confused with coarctation of the aorta (a far commoner condition), which is a narrowing of the aorta just beyond its "big bend" in the upper chest, several inches from the heart...