Open Heart by Stephen Westaby

Author:Stephen Westaby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

ten Life on a Battery

We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.

—Charles Darwin

IT WAS A WARM SUMMER’S MORNING IN THE FIRST WEEK OF June at the turn of the millennium. At 11:00 a.m., there was a tentative, almost apologetic, knock on the door. There stood Peter, his large frame filling the doorway. He leaned on a stick, swaying and sweating profusely. Head bowed, panting for breath. Out of pride, he refused to be pushed through the office door in a wheelchair. Only weeks before, he had received the last rites. But details still mattered to this man. Desperately trying to disguise his distress, he slowly lifted his head and stared straight ahead through the doorway. His lips and nose were blue. He couldn’t see me yet, but he reminded me of a concentration-camp victim. Hope gone long before. My secretary, Dee, was visibly shaken by Peter’s distress. I broke the silence. “You must be Peter. Please come in and sit down.” Hidden behind the stooped frame was Peter’s foster son, who parked the wheelchair in the corridor. I tried to lighten the mood. “Did you pay for that parking space? This is the NHS, you know!” They didn’t get it.

Peter shuffled slowly through to my room, then began staring at my certificates, awards, and other professional paraphernalia on the walls. He was checking me out. A religious man, he had worked as a counselor for the terminally ill with AIDS. Now he faced death himself. His existence had become that of an intelligent mind attached to a body rendered useless by heart failure. He was expecting the end to come soon. The sooner the better. I gestured to the armchair. He set the stick aside and sat down with a grunt. Now I was checking him out. He was breathless on the slightest exertion. His belly bulged with engorged liver and fluid. I could see that his legs were swollen and purple. He wore oversized sandals with socks stretched over massively swollen feet. There were stained dressings on leg ulcers that the socks failed to cover. I didn’t need to examine him. This was gross end-stage heart failure. I was amazed that he had made the effort to leave home. He could die at any moment.

Some months previous to Peter’s visit, Philip Poole-Wilson and I had written an open letter to members of the British Cardiac Society to announce that we were ready to implant a revolutionary new type of artificial heart. The Jarvik 2000, which we’d tested extensively in the laboratory. We needed to recruit terminally ill heart-failure patients who were ineligible for cardiac transplantation. At fifty-eight, Peter Houghton fit the bill.

I had already read his medical notes sent from his cardiologist. Peter had been first diagnosed in March 1995 with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy. It had been triggered by a viral illness that affected the heart muscle. Another bout of influenza that turned to myocarditis. He had initially recovered. Or so it seemed. Now he had an enlarged, flabby heart, an irregular heart rhythm, and a leaking mitral valve.

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