Word: cava
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Bypassed Duct. After the incisions were made, the real technical difficulties began. Moore and his chief assistant, Dr. Alan Birtch, clamped off the portal vein, which delivers blood to the liver for chemical processing, and the inferior vena cava. The hepatic artery, which delivers blood for the liver's own oxygen needs, was so damaged by pressure from the cancer as to be useless. Moore and Birtch decided to use in its place the right kidney artery. That meant removing the right kidney, but a single healthy kidney is all the body needs...
...nature's errors. Even so, Surgeon Frank Gerbode was in for a surprise. When he opened her chest to make connections for routing her circulation through a heart-lung machine, instead of finding two great veins returning used blood to the heart, he discovered an extra vena cava...
...procedure that usually requires 20 minutes or more of scalpel work and stitching. One experimenter with the staplers, Dr. Mark Ravitch of the University of Chicago School of Medicine, has worked out a new way to prevent emboli (traveling blood clots) from passing into the lungs through the vena cava, the body's largest vein. He simply has the staples turned at right angles to form a filter which can be implanted in the vein swiftly and easily. Used in this manner, the new machines have already graduated from stitchwork repairs to performing some of the most important stages...
...strange and tortuous route that the bullet fragment had followed. Slowed by smashing through his skull, it had landed in the left transverse sinus (a large vein). Then it had ''flowed" in the blood stream along the transverse sinus, down the main jugular vein and superior vena cava, into the right auricle (upper chamber) of the heart and through the tricuspid valve into the right ventricle. Thanks to the heart's muscular contractions, the fragment had worked halfway through the heart wall. If it had gone all the way, Kelley, who was ready to go home last...
Stefan Gierasch, as a brusque but sympathetic doctor, is a bright spot in the cast. He tells the little girl, who is matching him insult for insult. "Any more dancing like last night, kid, and your vena cava's gonna fall right out." It's the best line in the show...