The Man Who Touched His Own Heart by Rob Dunn
Author:Rob Dunn [Dunn, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science / Life Sciences / Anatomy & Physiology (See Also Life Sciences / Human A, Science / History, Science / Life Sciences / Human Anatomy & Physiology, Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects, Science / Life Sciences / Biology
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-02-03T05:00:00+00:00
Adolph Bachman came into the Medical Policlinic Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. He was near death, though he did not know it initially. The thirty-seven-year-old came in complaining of chest pain, angina. The doctors performed an angiogram on him to see his heart. A three-centimeter stretch of one of Bachman’s coronary arteries was nearly entirely blocked. Most of the artery looked fine; the angiogram showed a black river of blood where one should be, but then that river narrowed so much that whatever stream was present was invisible and obscured by collapsing riverbanks of plaque. Had he understood the angiogram, Bachman might have been worried, but the doctors did not look upset, so he would be strong. In fact, they smiled over him, like a flock of vultures.
Initially, the doctors told Bachman he would require a bypass, Favaloro’s new surgery—but at the last minute, an alternative possibility emerged. One of those doctors standing over Bachman was Andreas Gruentzig, who had invented something he really wanted to try out. A typical angiogram catheter has a narrow tip at its end through which dye is released. But Gruentzig had produced something unique after spending the last ten years experimenting and tinkering. At the end of his catheter, he had fastened a sort of sturdy balloon.
Gruentzig had tinkered anywhere he could, but the fortuitous last tweaks occurred in his apartment, where he and his assistant, Maria Schlumpf, did the work on his kitchen table. A picture still records the event. Scattered around them were the bits and pieces necessary for the endeavor—plastic, Krazy Glue, a bottle of wine, and balloons. A balloon on the end of a catheter seems like an invention one might see at a high-school science fair. It took thousands of tries to get it right, but the fundamental technology was ridiculously simple: a balloon would be inserted into the artery and inflated, the pressure of the inflation would make the narrow artery wider, the balloon would be removed, and more blood would flow through the vessel as a consequence. But it was one thing to test such a device in a kitchen and quite another to expand it inside the most intimate stretch of a man. Bachman would be that man; at least, he would be if Gruentzig could persuade Bachman to let him try the new invention.
Although Gruentzig had spent long hours working on his device and perfecting it, he had tested it during bypass surgeries only in arteries that did not need strong blood flow and would be either bypassed or clipped out. Bachman was the perfect candidate for a real attempt. Gruentzig explained the device to Bachman; he then told him something that would be said repeatedly by cardiologists to their patients: This approach will be much easier and will require less recovery time. We don’t even have to open up your chest.
Bachman was convinced. He signed the necessary forms, and, almost before Bachman lifted his pen off the paper, Gruentzig had inserted a catheter into his right coronary artery.
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