Human - Human Heart Surgery

[ManOnFire]

[img]https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/395241_205540872864231_189012890_n.jpg[/img]

[ManOnFire]

Christiaan Neethling Barnard (November 8, 1922 – September 2, 2001) was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first successful human-to-human heart transplant.
Following the first successful kidney transplant in 1953, in the United States, Barnard performed the first kidney transplant in South Africa in October 1967. Barnard experimented for several years with animal heart transplants. More than 50 dogs received transplanted hearts. With the availability of new breakthroughs introduced by several pioneers, amongst them Norman Shumway, several surgical teams were in a position to prepare for a human heart transplant. Barnard had a patient willing to undergo the procedure, but as with other surgeons, he needed a suitable donor.

He performed the world's first human heart transplant operation on 3 December 1967, in an operation assisted by his brother, Marius Barnard; the operation lasted nine hours and used a team of thirty people.
The patient, Louis Washkansky, was a 54-year-old grocer, suffering from diabetes and incurable heart disease. Barnard later wrote, "For a dying man it is not a difficult decision because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water, convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side." The donor heart came from a young woman, Denise Darvall, who had been rendered brain damaged in an accident on December 2, 1967, while crossing a street in Cape Town.
Darvall sustained a skull fracture and severe head injuries, after the car flung her across the road and her head hit the wheel cap of her own car. She could not stay alive without life support, and was essentially brain dead. At 9 p.m. on the day of the accident, the resuscitation team stopped trying to revive her.
Surgeons had a serious ethical problem because death then could only be declared by whole-body standards. The Harvard Criteria of Brain Death did not begin until 1968. The problem in this case was that, although Denise's brain was damaged, her heart was healthy. So why would it stop? Various reports over the years attributed conflicting reasons for her heart stopping. The answer has recently become known. For forty years, Barnard's brother Marius kept a secret: that rather than wait for her heart to stop beating, at Marius’s urging, Christiaan had injected potassium into Denise’s heart to paralyze it and thus, to render her technically dead by the whole-body standard. After securing permission from Darvall's father to use her heart, Barnard performed the transplant. Twenty years later, Dr. Marius Barnard recounted, "Chris stood there for a few moments, watching, then stood back and said, 'It works.'" Washkansky survived the operation and lived for 18 days. However, he succumbed to pneumonia as he was taking Immunosuppressive drugs. Though the first patient with the heart of another human being survived for only a little more than two weeks, Barnard had passed a milestone in a new field of life-extending surgery.
Barnard regarded the surgery as a success because the heart was "not being stimulated by an electrical machine" but completely by Washkansky. As Barnard related in his book, One Life, a decision was made on the fifth postoperative day to bombard Washkansky's system with immunosuppressants to guard against a potential rejection of the new heart. As later heart transplants would reveal, the signs noted at that time were part of a resettling program for the new heart and not necessarily an indication of rejection

[asha]

[img]http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6nbfljNMC1rzz3r3o1_400.gif[/img]

[cherlapalli_jailer]

wow

[budankaybalraju]

.. injected pottasium to stop her heart