Word: creighton
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...doctors struggled to keep the dying man alive, Copeland's assistants made desperate calls to organ-procurement agencies, hoping to find another human donor heart for him. None was available. Copeland then made a bold decision. He opted to use a virtually untested artificial heart to sustain Creighton until another human heart could be found--a direct violation of federal rules. There was no time, Copeland later said, to seek permission from the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the use of medical devices: "If we had asked them to make a decision, the patient would have been dead...
Friday afternoon, despite Copeland's extraordinary efforts, Creighton died, having survived for eleven hours with an artificial heart and nearly 36 hours with a second human heart transplant. Had he fully regained consciousness, he would have learned that he had made medical history: in the space of four days his life had been sustained by four different hearts (including his own). Throughout the marathon medical battle the big concern was time. When Creighton's heart failed on Wednesday, he was put on a heart-lung machine, a device used to pump and oxygenate blood during heart surgery. The machine could...
...Creighton's time on the heart-lung machine ticked on with no donor heart in sight, Copeland got permission from the patient's family to try an artificial heart. He called Heart Surgeon Cecil Vaughn of St. Luke's Hospital in Phoenix, who for two years has been experimenting with the "Phoenix heart," the invention of Kevin Cheng, a dental surgeon. Vaughn was stunned; the heart was years away from FDA approval and had been tested only twice in animals. "It was like a bomb falling from the sky," he recalls. Still he agreed to helicopter to Tucson immediately with...
...case of first come, first served. Vaughn arrived in Tucson at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 3 1/2 hours ahead of the Utah team. By then, Creighton had been on the heart-lung machine for nearly six hours. Says Vaughn, the choice was clear: "Either we try the artificial heart or we turn off the machine and tell Creighton's mother that her son is dead." After three hours of surgery, the pump was in place...
Like the Jarvik-7, the Phoenix heart runs on compressed air from a bulky external unit. The test model was built by Cheng in his spare time with limited funds and is 25% larger than a human heart. So large, in fact, that Creighton's chest had to remain open--though swathed in protective materials --for the eleven hours the device was in place...