A Needle in the Heart

A desperate, 23-year-old girl in a mental hospital tried to kill herself last fall with the only weapon at hand, a 2 1/2-in. sewing needle. She succeeded in getting it be tween her ribs and into her heart, but she did not die. Though the needle was a constant threat to her life, doctors let it alone for a month until the patient became calm enough to undergo an operation. X rays, meanwhile, showed that the needle was working its way through the tough heart muscle.

A needle, or a part of one, is the hardest to find of any embedded foreign body--a surgeon once spent three hours locating a needle in a man's foot, though the X ray showed it clearly. So Dr. Alexander Edwin William Ada, of Manhattan, who had never heard of anyone's getting a needle out of a heart before, decided to use the pencil-like electronic metal detector invented by Subway Engineer Samuel Berman (TIME, Aug. 30). It had been used successfully on 22 Pearl Harbor wounds.

What Dr. Ada did with the detector sounds simple, but the operation took more than two hours. First the detector showed that the needle had moved to the back of the heart, a different position from that shown in the last X ray. Next Dr. Ada had to tilt the beating heart, slowly move the detector over its undersurface. At last he thought he knew where to make his incision. He cut into the heart muscle, felt the needle, gently pulled it out.

Last week the patient was still in the hospital. But her heart was as good as new.

This is not the first time a patient has lived after having a foreign body in his heart. In World War I, surgeons succeeded in removing several bullets from soldiers' hearts. But their most famous case was a British officer who underwent a long operation to extract a bullet from his heart. Finally the surgeon gave up. The officer was still alive at last report. The tip of the bullet had worked its way into one of his heart chambers, swung like a clapper in a small bell with every heartbeat.

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