Word: barnard
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When did Denise Darvall die? Explains Dr. Marius Barnard, 40, younger brother of Christiaan and his right-hand assistant during surgery: "I know in some places they consider the patient dead when the electroencephalogram shows no more brain function. We are on the conservative side, and consider a patient dead when the heart is no longer working, the lungs are no longer working, and there are no longer any complexes...
...Donor. Though Denise Darvall's heart had stopped beating and she was dead, her heart could not be allowed to degenerate. Irreparable cell damage begins at the temperature of a naturally cooling cadaver in 30 minutes. It can be postponed for two to three hours by cooling. The Barnard team took no chances. By this time, Denise's body was in an operating room a few feet from the operating room in which Washkansky lay. A surgeon opened her chest by a midline incision, snipped some ribs and exposed the heart with its attached blood vessels...
Simultaneously, Washkansky was anesthetized, and at 2:15 a.m. Sunday one of the surgeons opened his chest. Assisting Christiaan Barnard, in addition to his brother Marius, were Drs. Rodney Hewitson and Terry O'Donovan. The main blood vessels were clamped in much the same way as Denise's had been, but in this case the heart-lung machine was to serve a directly opposite purpose: to circulate oxygenated blood through all of Washkansky's body except his about-to-be-discarded heart...
...Exercising the captain's prerogative, Dr. Christiaan Barnard moved into the first operating room and cut eight blood vessels to free Denise Darvall's heart; then he severed it from its ligament moorings. It was disconnected from the pump, and was carried to Washkansky's room, where it was connected to a small-capacity heart-lung machine. There it lay, chilled and perfused with oxygenated blood, while Surgeon Barnard removed most-but not quite all -of Washkansky's heart. He left in place part of the outer walls of both the auricles, the right carrying...
...painstaking sequence, Dr. Barnard stitched the donor heart in place. First the left-auricle, then the right. He joined the stub of Denise's aorta to Washkansky's, her pulmonary artery to his. Finally, the veins. Assistant surgeons removed the catheters from the implant as Barnard worked...