Word: patient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Every day hundreds of heart-attack survivors are given the same advice. "Learn to take it easy and you can still look forward to a long and productive life." But when the patient returns to the routines of normal living, the question remains: What is easy enough? Many, inspired perhaps by the example of the nation's two most famous heart patients, Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower, try to do too much too soon, and end up back in the hospital with a second heart attack...
...Every patient's safety margin is different, and at the Jewish Hospital of St. Louis, Dr. Franz U. Steinberg is carrying out experiments that expose chronic congestive-heart-failure patients to most of the physical stresses they may expect to encounter after going home or back to work. The carefully tabulated results are expected to set safe and sensible limits to normal exertion...
Oxygen Debt. In a room that looks more like a home-economics lab than a hospital ward, women wash and iron clothes, bake custards and brownies, make dresses on a sewing machine. Men work in carpentry, repair the sewing machine (the actual trade of one patient), walk to and from a desk carrying stacks of books, use filing cabinets. Pulse checks are made before, during and after any exertion, but the most valuable gauge of heart strain is a gadget called a "respiration gasmeter," which tells Dr. Steinberg most of what he wants to know...
...about the size of a lunchbox, and includes a transparent face mask attached to the box by a flexible hose. It operates on the principle that physical work involves energy consumption that can be measured by the amount of oxygen the body consumes. Air expelled from the patient's lungs during a work period is collected through the face mask and stored in an orange balloon. Then the balloon is detached and its contents analyzed. Measurement of the amount of unused oxygen tells Dr. Steinberg whether the patient's heart is being forced to work overtime in order...
Never Before. By combining the information obtained from the gasmeter with pulse checks and with the patient's own reactions, Dr. Steinberg judges just how strenuous and how dangerous any exertion is for any individual. If ironing, for example, is overtaxing, rest breaks every 30 minutes may be prescribed. Or ironing may be ruled out entirely while cooking remains O.K. Once the patient is sent home, follow-up visits are made by hospital staffers to check on such things as anxieties and family tensions, which also affect the heart. A 55-year-old patient, who had been...