Word: livers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Harvard and Boston University Medical School surgeons will help implement a new law this week that represents a major new breakthrough for heart, kidney, and liver transplant cases...
First, Surgeon Norman E. Shum-way's team concluded that Kasperak's life was threatened by liver and pile-duct trouble, for which they must operate. They found that Kasperak's main bile duct had been blocked by internal bleeding. They removed the gall bladder and inserted a tube to keep the duct open, and thus keep bile flowing to the small bowel, and to permit drainage if necessary...
...going. So an incision was made in his throat and a tube inserted to supply oxygen more efficiently and to remove mucus. Kasperak's big chest was rigid; other organs showed little tendency to close in around the small heart, and the cavity filled with fluid. His liver and kidneys had been damaged by a shortage of oxygenated blood...
Scarcely more than a day after the transplant, Kasperak began to bleed into his gastrointestinal tract. Evidently the clotting mechanism in his blood had been knocked out by the failure of his liver to produce the necessary enzymes. His platelets (tiny disklike elements in the blood, which are important in clotting) plummeted from a normal count of 250,000 per cu. mm. to 4,000. This required heroic measures. Kasperak had to have blood transfusions, and to remove metabolic wastes from his body the surgeons punched another hole in him-through the abdominal wall, for peritoneal dialysis. This...
Kasperak rallied through most of the week. But then he suffered a serious setback. Because of his poor liver function, an excess of bilirubin (a by-product of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in blood) began to build up in his system, and doctors scheduled another massive transfusion to remove impurities from his blood. Through it all, the one organ that consistently worked best was his acquired heart...