Word: lungfuls
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Early heart-lung designers, starting with Gibbon, tried oxygenation by "filming" the blood, i.e., letting it run thin over a flat surface. They wanted to avoid bubbling it because of the danger that some bubbles might be left in, and if these reached the brain, they could cause paralysis or death. Richard DeWall, a general practitioner from Anoka, Minn., went to work with Lillehei. Neophyte DeWall figured: Instead of dreading bubbles, why not put them to use? After all, the blood could be made to "film" around bubbles. He took the revolutionary step of pumping the patient's blood...
...College, had a hole as big as a half dollar between her auricles-a condition similar to that of Bailey's first hypothermia patient, and one that could not be corrected by his closed operation. Surgeon Gibbon and his Jefferson team piped Cecelia's blood to a "lung" made of stainless-steel screens set in an oxygen-filled chamber and pumped it back and forth for a total of 26 minutes. Cecelia Bavolek recovered quickly. It was the first time in history that man's artifice had successfully replaced the heart and lungs given him by nature...
...Bubble Problem. Despite this hopeful start the heart-lung machine was far from perfected. Minnesota's Clarence Walton Lillehei developed an ingenious temporary expedient: he used a donor, usually the father, for a child patient, connected their circulatory systems and thus made the donor's heart and lungs do the work of the patient's during the operation. The trouble was that this method risked two lives instead of one. Next, Lillehei & Co. used a freshly removed dog's lung, carefully cleaned and cleared of its own blood, for the same purpose. Two years ago, there...
Stopping the Beat. There is sharp disagreement as to how much blood a patient should get from the heart-lung machine during an operation. One school favors giving as much blood as the heart normally pumps at rest (about four quarts a minute in a 150-lb. man). Say their critics: any pump run at such high speed may damage the blood cells. Another major disagreement involves stopping the heartbeat. With its major vessels shut down and their blood bypassed to the machine, the heart goes somewhat limp, but keeps on beating because it continues to receive some blood through...
...them by adding an abnormal blood shunt. Young enthusiasts believe that an effort should be made to correct the abnormalities (open the pulmonary valve, close the interventricular defect and thus correct the overriding of the aorta). But deaths during and soon after operations of this type, with the heart-lung machine...