• U.S.

Medicine: Louis Block

2 minute read
TIME

For one of the three men who fought for life last week with transplanted hearts, the battle was brief.

Louis Block, 58, a retired fireman, had suffered a succession of heart attacks while he ran a radio-TV business in The Bronx. His heart grew bigger but weaker, causing a corresponding lung deterioration. Block was referred to Brooklyn’s Maimonides Medical Center, where Surgeon Adrian Kantrowitz had already attempted the transplant of a baby’s heart (TIME, Dec. 15).

The Kantrowitz team was prepared for delay in finding a donor with Block’s blood type, AB, Rh positive. This is found in only about 5% of Americans. By extraordinary chance, the first potential donor reported to Maimonides was AB positive. She was Helen Krouch, 29, a New Jersey office worker who had seemed in perfect health when she told her parents: “If I could save someone’s life with my heart, I would do it. If I knew I were going to die, I’d like to die that way.” Instead, she collapsed in a parking lot from the pressure of a tumor upon her brain stem and lapsed into a fatal coma. But her father remembered, and her doctor called Maimonides, where she died.

Helen Krouch weighed a scant 100 Ibs., and her heart was proportionately small. Louis Block weighed 170. Besides the difficulty of tailoring the transplant to fit, Surgeon Kantrowitz saw another problem: the donor heart almost certainly could not pump enough blood at first, although it might later increase its capacity. He decided to transplant the heart but to assist it for a while with a helium balloon pump inserted through a thigh artery and placed in Block’s aorta. This device (TIME, Aug. 25) has worked well for five patients in shock and near death after heart attacks.

The operation took more than eight hours—longest of the five heart transplants so far performed. When it was over, the exhausted Kantrowitz said realistically: “I don’t think any heart transplant can be considered a success until the patient goes home.” Eight hours later, Block died.

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