Word: balloonful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...apparition that graced the skies over France last week looked rather like a giant exclamation point, which was entirely appropriate for the occasion. An enormous silvery balloon -eleven stories high-was sailing majestically through the air at 12 m.p.h., while in a red and yellow gondola below rode three bleary-eyed Americans, their excitement overcoming their exhaustion...
...ectoplastic fantasy, very much in the spirit of Joseph Cornell. Some photographs are manifestly the product of chance, an incongruous moment caught in flight. The most startling of these is Mark Cohen's Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, June 1975, which shows a girl's head almost occluded by a sinister, balloon-like object (bubble gum, probably) with a hand rising behind her head like a crown of flesh. Thanks largely to the contrast between the light on her hair, which prickles electrically, the vague street background and the greasy, diffused surface of the bubble, it is an image of unrepeatable weirdness...
...other patients, a variation of the new technique may make bypass surgery feasible. Explains Cardiac Surgeon Eugene Wallsh: "When you have too many obstructions in an artery, you can't bypass each one. But with the balloon catheter, you can open up some blocks and then bypass others." Wallsh has done just that in six patients. Adds Stertzer: "It might also be possible to reopen bypass grafts that have closed down...
...doctors are trying to assess the long-range effects. For example, do the arteries close down again, and when? Where does the plaque eventually go? Stertzer speculates about a possible "self-healing" mechanism. Indeed, when the arteries of a few patients were re-examined a month or so after balloon dilatation, doctors could not see where the original narrowings had been. The same phenomenon has been noticed in some of the hundreds of patients who have undergone plaque compression in leg arteries. In 70% of 300 cases studied, the arteries are still open two to three years later...
Before they know if a similar percentage holds true for heart arteries, doctors will have to use the balloon dilatation technique on hundreds of cardiac patients. Then, says Stertzer, "if 80% of the arteries are open after a year, we're into a revolution in cardiology...