Medicine: The Anxious Hour

One day last summer Dr. George Heitzman of Denver’s National Jewish Hospital was performing experimental heart surgery on a dog. Suddenly, the animal’s heart went into ventricular fibrillation (a quivering and trembling that is usually fatal unless the heart can be stimulated into resuming its normal beat). Surgeon Heitzman began massaging the heart. Half an hour went by. The technicians in the operating room gave up, but not the surgeon. After about 40 minutes, the heart started to beat again, and the dog made a quick recovery.

A few weeks later Dr. Heitzman had a human patient on the operating table-a honey-blonde ten-year-old named Susan Kasper from Wilson, Kans. Reason for the operation: Susan had a hole in one of the inner heart walls. Using hypothermia (i.e., the child was packed in ice cubes to lower her body temperature and reduce the tissues’ need for blood), Surgeon Heitzman mended the hole in nine minutes, but the heart went into fibrillation.

Heitzman began massaging the heart immediately. Eight electrical shocks were given, but fibrillation continued. Drugs were applied directly to the heart six times without result. Then more massage. Dr. Heitzman squeezed and released until his hand was insensible, and another member of the surgical team took over. The team massaged in relays until Heitzman’s turn came again. The heart kept fibrillating. To counteract the slowing of body functions caused by hypothermia, the surgeons administered a saline solution to warm the chest cavity. Massage went on.

Suddenly, 60 minutes after it had begun its eccentric action, Susan’s heart began beating again. Heitzman and his team sewed up the chest cavity, waited anxiously for her to come out of anesthesia, fearing brain damage that can result from prolonged interruption of the brain’s oxygen supply. Eventually. Susan opened her eyes, spied her distraught parents, chirped: “Hi, Mom. Hi, Pop.” Susan’s only lingering defect was damage to the spinal column, which kept her from walking, but today, three months after her brush with death, therapy has put her on her feet. She can walk without help, and eventually she will be fully recovered.