Death of a Patient

"The pump did what we thought it would do," said Surgeon Michael E. DeBakey. "The patient's heart was already showing improvement. With this important encouragement, we look forward to using the device again in the near future."

The pump in question was the plastic "half-heart" attached to the chest wall of Marcel L. DeRudder, 65, in Houston's Methodist Hospital (TIME, April 29). For more than 41 days, with never a falter after the first hour, it had done three-quarters of the work normally done by the left ventricle, the heart's main pumping chamber. What suddenly killed DeRudder last week was a rupture of the left lung. A plastic tube slipped through a small cut in his windpipe had been delivering oxygen under pressure to his lungs. What actually caused the rupture was a mystery.

DeRudder had not regained consciousness after the long, dramatic operation. The post-mortem examination showed why. Part of a clot, found in the left auricle during surgery, had evidently broken away, traveled to DeRudder's brain, and blocked a major cerebral artery. Surgeon DeBakey was buoyed by the fact that the pump's own firm but gentle action had created no clotting problems, though DeRudder had had them earlier.

When the half-heart pump is next used, which may be within a couple of weeks, DeBakey's mechanical-minded research assistant, Surgeon William Aker, will have made some minor modifications. In DeRudder's case, the two main inflow and outflow tubes, stitched into his left auricle and aorta, were led to a plastic frame, 1 1/2 in. thick, implanted in the chest wall. The hemispherical pump was attached externally to this. The connecting tips of the frame for the pump will be modified to make the surgery simpler and therefore quicker.

Dr. DeBakey concedes that a partial or even total artificial heart must be considered only a stopgap, until preventive measures against heart disease are perfected. But even if these were achieved tomorrow, he declares, "the present generation would require the benefits of a workable artificial heart." Such a device might save the lives of an estimated 300,000 U.S. heart-attack victims each year.

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