Word: pumps
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With the air tube and electrical leads hooked up, Mrs. Ceraso's circulation took a new turn. When her left ventricle contracted, it propelled most of its blood, against negligible resistance, into the pump's Silastic chamber. The electrical impulse signaling this event then triggered the pump, and a gush of oxygen into the outer Fiberglas chamber squeezed the blood out of the Silastic core into the aorta. In the process, it pushed the blood along with much more force than Mrs. Ceraso's enlarged and enfeebled left ventricle could have mustered unaided. To reduce the risk...
...perfectly," said Dr. Kantrowitz, "and there is evidence that the heart has been helped enormously." Then he added, with due medical caution: "Our definition of success is when Mrs. Ceraso can go home again"-with the artificial half heart still in her chest, disconnected, but with a portable air pump for use as needed...
...pump in question was the plastic "half-heart" attached to the chest wall of Marcel L. DeRudder, 65, in Houston's Methodist Hospital (TIME, April 29). For more than 41 days, with never a falter after the first hour, it had done three-quarters of the work normally done by the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber. What suddenly killed DeRudder last week was a rupture of the left lung. A plastic tube slipped through a small cut in his windpipe had been delivering oxygen under pressure to his lungs. What actually caused the rupture...
...regained consciousness after the long, dramatic operation. The post-mortem examination showed why. Part of a clot, found in the left auricle during surgery, had evidently broken away, traveled to DeRudder's brain, and blocked a major cerebral artery. Surgeon DeBakey was buoyed by the fact that the pump's own firm but gentle action had created no clotting problems, though DeRudder had had them earlier...
When the half-heart pump is next used, which may be within a couple of weeks, DeBakey's mechanical-minded research assistant, Surgeon William Aker, will have made some minor modifications. In DeRudder's case, the two main inflow and outflow tubes, stitched into his left auricle and aorta, were led to a plastic frame, 1½ in. thick, implanted in the chest wall. The hemispherical pump was attached externally to this. The connecting tips of the frame for the pump will be modified to make the surgery simpler and therefore quicker...