Word: burcham
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been dauntlessly enthusiastic over the prospect of receiving an artificial heart. "If you get it in right," Jack Burcham, a former railroad engineer, promised Implant Surgeon William DeVries, "I'll make it work." Getting it in right proved to be just the first of many difficulties faced by doctor and patient at Humana Hospital Audubon in Louisville. The cheerful father of four from Leroy, Ill., never really recovered from the initial surgery. Last week, just ten days after becoming the fifth and oldest human recipient of the Jarvik-7 heart, Burcham died, at 62. As DeVries later admitted...
Like his predecessors, Barney Clark, William Schroeder, Murray Haydon and Swedish Patient Leif Stenberg, Burcham was a dy- ing man who gambled on the artificial heart to win a few extra months of life. "We were hoping that he would be able to live like Schroeder," said Jack B. Burcham, 41, the < patient's son, "but Dad was just too weak." (Schroeder has survived more than 150 days with his artificial heart; Barney Clark died after 112 days...
...Burcham's cascade of medical problems began during surgery, when doctors discovered that his chest cavity was too small to accommodate the grapefruit- size Jarvik-7. DeVries was forced to pare away at the breastbone and twist the heart's chambers around to make it fit. "It was like putting a round peg in a square hole," he said. The struggle to implant the artificial heart probably contributed to Burcham's massive bleeding over the next 24 hours. In all, he lost more than five gallons of blood--four times the total volume in an average-size adult. Only continual...