Word: fae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...response to questions last week, Bailey said that Baby Fae suffered little pain in her final hours. "I believe she suffered a great deal more before I saw her than after," he insisted. "The best days of her short life were after her transplant." The parents, he maintained, had no regrets about the experiment: "They felt that it was an enriching experience...
Despite the hospital's efforts to protect the identity of the parents, information about the mother, Teresa, 23, began to seep out last week. Baby Fae's unmarried parents are an impoverished couple who moved from Kansas to Barstow, Calif, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, about two years ago. According to an NBC report, both parents had brushes with the law in their home state: the mother for passing bad checks, the father for disorderly conduct. Though the couple had lived together for five years and had a 2½-year-old son, the father ? deserted Teresa a week...
...hospital called Fae's mother within the next two days and, as Bailey explained, proposed the baboon heart transplant. A friend recalls that Teresa "decided she had to do anything possible to try and save her baby's life." Barstow residents who are close to the mother say that she was well aware of the experimental nature of the operation and was not pressured into agreeing...
Even so, many questions have been raised about the way in which consent was obtained. The hospital's refusal to release the text of the form signed by Fae's parents fueled the controversy. This document "is crucial," says Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at the Hastings Center in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. "Were the parents informed about the possibility of a human heart?" Others felt that Bailey may have misrepresented the facts about the "Norwood procedure," a surgical treatment recently developed to help infants with hypoplastic heart. Indeed, in his public statements, Bailey understated the success rate of this...
...medical world will be reflecting on the case of Baby Fae for a long time. While a number of physicians considered the experiment premature, most were impressed and surprised by the infant's record-setting survival. "This has been a success," says Dr. Donald Hill, chief of cardiovascular surgery at Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center in San Francisco. "They have demonstrated that there is a window early in life where the opportunity to make a successful transplant from a baboon to a human exists." But neither Hill nor other doctors foresaw any possibility of using simian hearts as a permanent solution...