Word: duke
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Parts of major arteries, including the biggest of all, the aorta, are far easier to deal with. They are regularly replaced or bypassed with grafts of Dacron knit such as was used in surgery on the Duke of Windsor. Electrical pacemakers to regulate or replace the beat of a faltering heart have by now been implanted under the abdominal skin of 10,000 patients, with leads to their hearts; all these devices are encased in Silastic because of its inertness...
Music by Muzak was soft and low. Two Sleepy People and So Bears My Heart for You flowed over the operating room in Houston's Methodist Hospital. But the patient on the table, His Royal Highness Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, Duke of Windsor, was already going under the anesthetic. Baylor University's famed surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey was scarcely listening as he performed an operation that only a few years ago would have seemed dangerous indeed. He slit open the 70-year-old duke's belly and cut down to the aorta...
...duke had no hint of trouble until about four years ago. Then, during a routine checkup, Manhattan's Dr. Arthur Antenucci diagnosed an aneurysm that required watching. But it was too small at the time to justify the major surgery that would be involved in its removal. No special diet was needed, no drugs. How little distress the aneurysm caused the duke is shown by the fact that he was able to keep working steadily for most of this year on his movie, A King's Story...
...blood pulsing through it could be felt by the doctor's hand. And it was in an especially dangerous location, below the branching of the kidney arteries (see diagram). It was time for surgery, but there did not seem to be much of a rush -the duke went to Houston by slow, jolting train...
...DeBakey, who developed the operation and has already done it 6,500 times, the procedure was routine. But alter he made a 6-in. incision through the duke's lean abdominal wall, the surgeon discovered that the aneurysm was even bigger than expected. 'The size of a small cantaloupe or large grapefruit," he reported. Instead of a simple balloon shape with a neat "stalk," it was "fusiform," with its base extending along the aorta. Worse, the wall of the aorta had eroded until it was on the point of rupturing...