Word: patiently
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...surgeons made rapid advances in heart treatments. But they struggled to perform operations that lasted longer than four minutes, because the interruption in circulation caused brain damage. That changed in 1953, when Dr. John Gibbon Jr. of Philadelphia used a heart-lung respirator to keep an 18-year-old patient alive for 27 minutes while he repaired a hole in her heart, paving the way for open-heart surgeries to enter widespread use. (See pictures of the Cleveland Clinic's smarter approach to health care...
...sewing the heart of a young woman killed in a car accident into the chest of a middle-aged man. After nearly four hours of surgery, a single jolt of electricity started it beating. "Christ," Barnard said. "It's going to work." And for a while, it did. The patient survived the operation, but the immunosuppressant drugs used to keep his body from rejecting the new organ weakened him. Eighteen days after the operation, he succumbed to pneumonia. (See Dr. Christiaan Barnard on the Dec. 15, 1967, cover of TIME...
Still, the fleeting success made Barnard an overnight sensation and inspired surgeons around the world to try their hands at working the same miracle. Within two years, more than 60 teams had replaced ailing hearts in some 150 patients. But keeping a patient's immune system from turning on the new organ often required large doses of immunosuppressant drugs that left patients vulnerable to deadly infections. Eighty percent of transplant recipients died within a year. Surgeons grew discouraged; by 1970, the number of transplants had plunged to 18, down from 100 just two years earlier. (See TIME's Wellness blog...
...doctors who kept trying was Stanford University's Norman Shumway, on whose surgical techniques Barnard had relied. His team of doctors and scientists developed a technique to determine whether a patient's body was gearing up to reject an organ, allowing them to tailor their prescriptions of immunosuppressants. The results were impressive. From 1968 to 1980, nearly 200 heart transplants were performed at Stanford. About 65% of Shumway's patients survived at least one year, and half hung on for five...
Ondaatje is best known for his novel “The English Patient,” which was adapted into an Academy-Award winning film...