Word: nathaneal
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...scan at a local hospital confirmed Lorri's battlefield diagnosis. Not only had the pencil pierced Nathan's heart, but it had penetrated a valve. He would need open-heart surgery--which meant Nathan had to be airlifted to the nearest cardiac surgeon and heart-lung machine, in Great Falls, 100 miles away...
...while Lorri dialed 911, she kept one hand cupped over the pink rubber eraser to prevent the panicky Nathan from yanking it. "There was nothing you could do," recalls Mike Earley, Nathan's stepfather. "Adrenaline all the way up to your eyeballs, and all you can do is hold his hand, let him know you're there...
...nearly three hours before Nathan finally made it to the operating table. A team led by Dr. Brett Williams--summoned from his own 45th-birthday celebration--put the right side of Nathan's heart into cardiac arrest, diverted his blood supply to the heart-lung machine and began repairing the damage. "There was absolutely no blood anywhere. It looked to be an immaculate perforation," Williams told TIME...
That's not all: If the pencil had taken a slightly different trajectory, it could have destroyed far more of the heart's blood-pumping machinery. And it just missed an artery in Nathan's chest that could have bled enough to send the boy into shock. "As it was," says Williams, "there couldn't have been more than a thimbleful of blood in the pericardium [the membrane surrounding the heart]. He needed no transfusion, which is fairly unusual for a child undergoing heart surgery...
...operation was straightforward. "We were at fairly close quarters, trying not to disturb the pencil and aggravate the injury," says Williams. But there was no infection, no contamination from pencil lead--and no permanent damage. Indeed, by last Saturday, less than three weeks after his open-heart surgery, Nathan was itching to get out of the house. "I want to go back to school," he told TIME. And parents who used to warn kids of the dangers posed to eyes by various sharp objects now have, for the foreseeable future, a new and even more frightening cautionary tale to tell...