A gentleman named Craig Lewis, a 55-year-old was experiencing a life
threatening heart disease, named “amyloidosis”, was admitted to the Texas Heart
Institute. It’s a uncommon autoimmune disease that fills inner organs with a
sticky protein that roots the quick heart, kidney and liver disaster. Without
instant interference Lewis would have possibly died within days.
Luckily,
Dr. Billy Cohn and Dr. Bud Frazier from the Institute came up with what they
call a “continuous flow” device which would let blood to circulate through his
body without a pulse. They detached Mr
Lewis’ heart and then connected the device -the patient was up, well and
speaking with doctors the very same day.
Dr.
Cohn is a expert surgeon, as well as an discoverer and scientist who has
consumed a large part of his life developing technologies to substitute or
repair the human heart. The most distinguished device being what is called the
Left Ventricular Assist Device, also termed as LVADs.
Cohn
teamed up with Dr. Bud Frazier to make a new discovery that uses the technology
from LVADs to duplicate the functions of the heart’s right and left ventricles. They (inappropriately) tried their device on
70 calves, all of whom gave a flat line on an EKG, no heart rate or pulse, yet
they were flawlessly normal, ate normally and related with each other normally
but again, had no heartbeat.
As
stated above, Craig Lewis was the first human to take this technology. The
process took less than 48 hours and was a big success. His kidneys and liver
were not so lucky though, they were fading him and after a few months his
family asked the doctors to disconnect the device.
Below
is a clip named “Heart Stop Beating.” It’s the story of these two doctors and
the procedure they had to go through to substitute this man’s dying heart with
a ‘continuous flow’ device.
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