Surgery: A Patch to Help a Heart

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The two eleven-year-old girls in the suburbs of Denver felt sure they were strong enough to join their friends in Christmas play, but they were under doctors' orders to take it easy. Each of them had recently come out of the hospital after radical surgery for which their hearts had been stopped. And though theirs were rare cases, neither team of surgeons had known what the other was doing.

Ro Anne Campbell of Lakewood was only five when she was found to have a heart murmur. Doctors thought little of it, as such murmurs often disappear without treatment. But as Ro Anne grew, she had less and less energy. Diagnostic studies in 1959 at Denver's National Jewish Hospital showed that her heart's left ventricle had become enlarged by having to pump against the resistance of a narrowed aorta. She was too ill for an operation then. Even more disturbing, the doctors diagnosed Ro Anne's aortic abnormality as a form in which the great artery is narrowed just above the point where it leaves the heart, close to the aortic valve. This is such a rare condition* that in the U.S. only a scant half-dozen operations had been done to correct it.

A Cool 77°. By last Labor Day, Ro Anne seemed strong enough to undergo the operation, and Dr. Melvin M. Newman, 41, N.J.H.'s chief of surgery, was satisfied that recent advances in technique had made the procedure safe enough. On operation morning, Ro Anne got a general anesthetic. Then she was put in an ice bath. After 15 minutes, her temperature had dropped about 6° F. She was taken out of the bath and Dr. Newman opened her chest. The surgeons saw the rare type of aortic narrowing they had expected, and decided to correct it by putting in a patch. They inserted tubes in the great veins near her heart and in a thigh artery, to hook her up to a heart-lung machine.

When Ro Anne's temperature dropped to 82°, her heart stopped beating. The pump was already doing her heart's work and also cooling her blood. It continued to do so while the surgeons put clamps on the aorta both above and below the constriction. Dr. Newman made an inch-long cut in the aorta's wall and stitched in a plastic (Teflon) gusset, two-thirds of an inch wide at the base. This made the great artery a uniform width from the aortic valve to its big bend. Ro Anne's temperature hit a low of 77°, then a double electric shock restarted her heart. The pump-cooler was disconnected, and Ro Anne's chest was closed. For the first time in her life, her blood had a normal, unobstructed flow from her heart to her entire body.