Word: oxygenate
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...Boerema and his colleagues began operating on youngsters suffering from one of the commonest forms of blue-baby disorder-Pallet's tetralogy, a set of four serious heart defects which nearly always occur together. All the children were under five; they had only about 70% of normal oxygen in their red cells, and they were too ill to risk the heroic surgery that would correct all their heart defects. Dr. Boerema wanted to do a palliative operation, after which a final operation could await a few more years of growth and added strength...
...Boerema ruled out the use of a heart-lung machine because that, too, seemed dangerously drastic. Instead, he operated in a chamber at triple atmospheric pressure. With the children breathing 100% oxygen, instead of air with its 20% oxygen, they were getting 15 times the normal supply. They turned pink at once. Dr. Boerema clamped off the great vessels around their hearts to shut off circulation. Unhurriedly, he made a connection between two arteries. Thanks to the oxygen drenching, the children showed no ill effects from the blood-flow shut down, and emerged from the operations with oxygen concentrations...
Deceptively Simple. Success was dramatic. But progress from theory to high-pressure operating room had been no easy matter. Before he could risk his new procedure on children, Dr. Boerema had experimented widely with the effects of high pressure. In the process, he discovered that oxygen drenching was good for victims of gas gangrene, which is caused by a bacillus closely related to that of tetanus. When he figured out the explanation, he realized that he had done more than develop a new form of therapy; at last he knew enough about the effects of high pressure to start...
...principle is deceptively simple. Little oxygen is normally dissolved in the fluid portion of the blood, which relies on the hemoglobin in its red cells to carry oxygen, in a loosely combined form, to all the body's tissues. Dr. Boerema learned from animal experiments and his gas gangrene patients that it matters little during an operation whether the amount of oxygen carried by hemoglobin is increased: what counts is that under high pressure the watery part of the blood dissolves a considerable amount of gas. In Dr. Boerema's operations, that gas is life-saving oxygen...
...most promising method he could find was the "controlled atmosphere" system now in use among apple growers. Stored in sealed, refrigerated warehouses, apples begin to deteriorate, but in the process they use up oxygen. Within two or three weeks there is so much carbon dioxide in the air that the ripening process slows practically to a halt. Trouble is, the controlled atmosphere has to be carefully checked; too much CO2 can also harm the fruit. A second trouble is that once the warehouse is opened to remove a load, the whole process has to be started once more...