Medicine: Part-Plastic Heart

Ever since a siege of rheumatic fever at eleven, Mary Dansereau had been facing the prospect of an early death. The mitral valve of her heart had become calcified. To maintain circulation, her damaged heart had to work harder, and it was slowly giving out. For four years she had been a semi-invalid, unable to do much for her two children, and so weak that she took an hour to make a bed.

Last December, over the objections of nervous relatives, Mary agreed to undergo a delicate operation. Doctors explained that the radical repair job they had in mind had been tried before, although none of the patients had lived long enough to prove the method successful. But at 37, Mary was convinced that life would be worthwhile only if she could be cured.

At Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, surgeons cut into her heart and enlarged the opening of its mitral valve. They anchored a small (½-in.) lucite ball on a steel suture just below the flaps of the valve. The plastic ball can move just enough to allow blood to drain downward into the ventricle. It moves up to act as a stopper in the mitral valve when the heart contracts to pump blood into the aorta.

Now, two months later, Mary Dansereau is the only human with a part-plastic heart. She will have to take life easy for a while, but even before she left the hospital she felt so much better that she was able to kick up a little jig of joy.