The Beat of Life

January 12, 2011

Right now I am currently on a train from Bad Oeynhausen, where we visited the Heart and Diabetes Center, back to Hannover. Today was amazing. This morning I saw a double bypass surgery with a radial artery on a beating heart! Seeing a heart inside a body has been on my bucket list since tenth grade (along with seeing intestines inside a human, maybe another time). This man’s heart was pretty large and probably too fatty, but watching it beat inside the chest was the experience of a lifetime. I loved that I could easily tell that the muscle contraction began at the apex and spiraled to the base. And the strength of each beat was impressive. If it wasn’t attached to the major blood vessels I think it might of jumped right onto the floor. I was impress that the surgeons were able to intrically operate on it while it was still moving. I was even more fascinated by the equipment they used. They had an apparatus called an octopus, which held about one square inch of muscle mostly stable while they operated. It’s called an octopus because it has two arms with suction cups on the bottom that attach to the heart and then to the retractor that holds the chest cavity open. Way to go biomedical engineering.

After lunch my group got to go to the artificial heart unit of the hospital. First we got to hold some LVAD and artificial hearts. I really enjoyed examining the Berlin Heart because I did a lot of research on that particular LVAD for the project last year in physiology. It was actually pretty different than I imagined it being in the pictures. Then we got to meet three patients. The first had a fully implanted continuous flow LVAD. The second had two Berlin Hearts hanging outside his abdomen,. It was fascinating watching the Berlin hearts at work. We could see the blood flowing though them and the membrane inside push the blood through. It was easy to tell which one was assisting the right vertical and which was assisting the left because the blood color was different. This was fascinating to me because all of the pictures show oxygenated blood as red and deoxygenated blood as blue, but it was different to actually see the difference in the color of the blood. The third patient had a total fully implanted artificial heart. I’ve always kinda wondered what it would be like to not be able to feel your heart beat inside your chest. It’s a pretty eerie thought, but it’s better than the alternative of no blood flow at all.

It’s interesting to compare everything I saw at the Heart and Diabetes Center with the cattle clinic at the vet school yesterday. Besides the fact that there was a cow strapped to a really wide operating table, the facilities looked like photos from some the of the first operating galleries. The main teaching room with the stadium seating reminded me of the room Dr. Wasser lectured in at the Charite Museum in Berlin. Seeing these two extreme conditions just a day apart made me realize how far the medical field has advanced. Forty-five years ago you were dead if your heart stopped. Thirty years ago you were dead if you couldn’t find a donor heart, or were stuck in a hospital bed with tubes connected to you unable to move. It’s amazing the advancements that have taken place. I look forward to the ones that are to come I the next fifty year. Maybe by then we will have an artificially heart the can completely replace a sick one instead of only being a bridge to transplant.