Word: patient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...press reports first proclaimed, "history's first implant of an artificial heart," but it incorporated famed Surgeon Michael E. DeBakey's latest refinements of a device on which he and his colleagues at Baylor and Rice universities have worked for eight years. And it gave a doomed patient renewed hope of life...
...team soon found that DeRudder had a badly damaged and calcified mitral valve, through which blood passes from the left auricle to the left ventricle. This valve had worked so poorly for so long that the overtaxed left ventricle had become enlarged, flabby and inefficient. It was possible that Patient DeRudder could survive with nothing more than an artificial valve, but the surgeons could not be sure until they cut into his chest and saw for themselves...
...that might help: a "half-heart" to assist the left ventricle by partially bypassing it (see diagram). An instrument based on the same principle but of different design and materials had been first tried in man 2½ years ago, when Dr. DeBakey used it to keep a moribund patient alive for 3½ days (TIME, Nov. 8, 1963), and for only the second time last February, when Brooklyn's Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz used a comparable device for 24 hours...
...Patient DeRudder's condition so grave as to justify the admitted risk? It took Dr. DeBakey, with three assisting surgeons, until 10:14 to decide that the answer was yes. Swiftly Dr. DeBakey took one of the two plastic tubes attached to the pump device and stitched it into the hole in the left auricle. Then he took the other tube and sewed it into a hole in the side of the aorta. At DeRudder's chest wall, the round plaque holding these tubes, together with smaller tubes for priming and flushing with saline solution, was attached...
This kind of thematic material doesn't lend itself to irony. So even when Babe flirts with Ionesco in a scene where you can't tell who is the loony and who the patient, the whole thing floats on soap bubbles...