Word: implanters
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...been dauntlessly enthusiastic over the prospect of receiving an artificial heart. "If you get it in right," Jack Burcham, a former railroad engineer, promised Implant Surgeon William DeVries, "I'll make it work." Getting it in right proved to be just the first of many difficulties faced by doctor and patient at Humana Hospital Audubon in Louisville. The cheerful father of four from Leroy, Ill., never really recovered from the initial surgery. Last week, just ten days after becoming the fifth and oldest human recipient of the Jarvik-7 heart, Burcham died, at 62. As DeVries later admitted...
...chest cavity was too small to accommodate the grapefruit- size Jarvik-7. DeVries was forced to pare away at the breastbone and twist the heart's chambers around to make it fit. "It was like putting a round peg in a square hole," he said. The struggle to implant the artificial heart probably contributed to Burcham's massive bleeding over the next 24 hours. In all, he lost more than five gallons of blood--four times the total volume in an average-size adult. Only continual transfusions kept him alive until a second operation stanched the flow...
Even before his implant surgery, Burcham had been experiencing kidney failure, a common complication of advanced heart disease. The stress of the back-to-back operations and the need for multiple transfusions aggravated the problem, and twice last week Burcham had to undergo dialysis. It was during the second treatment on Wednesday afternoon that a nurse, listening to Burcham's chest with a stethoscope, noticed that his breathing was labored in the left lung. X rays showed that a large amount of fluid had collected in his chest. Doctors later learned that the fluid was blood that had congealed into...
...have plagued the artificial- heart program. Both Clark and Schroeder, who is now living in a specially equipped apartment across the street from the hospital, suffered serious neurological problems that left them mentally impaired. Haydon, who was hailed two months ago at the time of surgery as the best implant candidate of all, has yet to be weaned from a respirator. At the Louisville conference, DeVries for the first time publicly presented his most recent findings on the array of complications associated with the artificial heart. All four American recipients of the Jarvik-7, he noted, had developed a serious...
...Burcham's death has shown, one of the most vexing problems in implant patients is bleeding. The loss of blood is especially hard to manage, DeVries noted, because patients face the equal and opposite threat of too much clotting. (Blood clots forming in the vicinity of the artificial heart are suspected of having caused Schroeder's strokes.) Said DeVries: "The tightrope that we walk between over- and undercoagulation will have to be examined again a little closer...