Word: drummonds
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Last week, as Cardiac Surgeon Jack Copeland was examining his patient in the sixth-floor intensive care unit at University Medical Center in Tucson, he noticed that Drummond was slurring his words. Soon afterward, the patient's right hand became immobile. Though Copeland hoped that Drummond's problems might be caused by abnormal levels of blood sugar or the aftereffects of sleeping medication, he feared the worst. "I had to admit it to myself," he says, "but I didn't want to." A neurologist confirmed that Drummond had suffered a mild stroke, most probably from tiny blood clots forming...
...Although Drummond quickly recovered almost complete use of his right hand and the ability to speak clearly, the stroke left him "depressed and frustrated" and forced his doctors to speed up the transplant timetable. Rather than wait for Drummond to build up his strength for the second operation, as had originally been planned, they decided to perform the transplant as soon as a suitable donor organ became available. That happened at week's end, when doctors obtained and transplanted a heart from a 19-year-old Texas motorcycle accident victim...
...Drummond's stroke-caused crisis cast doubt on a new phase in the artificial heart program, one with a more limited and, to many, a more realistic goal: to use the mechanical device not as a permanent implant but only as a bridge, keeping a seriously ill heart patient alive until a human donor heart can be found. The Food and Drug Administration had authorized Copeland to use the Jarvik-7 for that purpose only a few weeks before, and has since granted permission to a handful of other surgeons. "We're not really doing this in an attempt...
...Drummond became a candidate for a transplant in August after a rare viral infection irreversibly damaged his heart. Admitted to the Tucson center two weeks ago, he was classified as a "9," which meant he required a transplant within 48 hours. Two days later a heart had still not been found, and Copeland recalls, "he looked like a piece of yellow paste. We felt he was going to die within hours." Unless a donor heart could be found, Drummond's only chance for survival was a temporary Jarvik...
...lessen the chances of clots after the five-hour implant operation, doctors gave Drummond low doses of heparin, an anticoagulant; they also lowered the air pressure that drives the mechanical heart to ensure a gentler blood flow and thus reduce the turbulence that damages red blood cells. Unfortunately, the strategy failed to work. But by week's end Drummond had a human heart and was in critical but stable condition...