Word: pericardium
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...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...
Carson agonized over what material to use in constructing separate veins for the boys. Because brain sinuses are structurally different from veins elsewhere in the body, a vessel from the leg or another area would not do. Finally a colleague suggested a novel solution: using part of the pericardium, the membrane that surrounds the heart. "That was a fabulous idea," says Carson. "We knew we were going into the chest anyway. It was right there in front of us saying, 'Take...
...members of a surgical team took their places around the operating table. With confidence born of experience, the surgeons made a vertical incision from the patient's collarbone to his diaphragm, sawed through his breastbone and then, using a framelike mechanism, spread the rib cage and exposed the pericardium, or heart...
...Donald Effler, tall, athletic and at 55 one of the country's leading heart surgeons, strode into the operating room. Taking his place among his subordinates, he slit open the pericardium and examined the heart. Another surgeon, meanwhile, opened the patient's thigh and removed a foot-long section of the saphenous vein, one of four major veins that carry blood from the lower limbs to the heart. Effler began rapping out commands like a drill sergeant, initiating the procedure to shut down the patient's heart and turn its functions over to a heart-lung machine...
After that, says Dr. Gerbode, "it was just a matter of not making any mistakes." It was also a 91-hour marathon for him and his three assistant surgeons. With the heart exposed (see diagram), Dr. Gerbode stripped away part of its outer sac (pericardium) for later use. Next he sewed up the ductus arteriosus where it joined the pulmonary artery. Then, with his patient connected to the heart-lung pump, he set its heat-exchanger to chill Mrs. Vanella's blood to 68° F., to reduce the brain's oxygen demands...