The Emergency Room
RNs reminisce about early heart surgeries
By Carole A. Judge, for What2Be
Procedures compared to today’s technology might appear to be primitive but they were effective. Improvisation and common sense were the orders of the day.
“They asked me if I would like to learn how to operate the heart-lung machine and I jumped at the chance,” Weinert said. Weinert was sent to Dallas to spend a week with legendary cardiac surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey and surgical team. She then went to the Cleveland Clinic for a week where the heart-lung machine was created.
“It started off as a piece of sheet metal and it took five days to put it together,” Weinert said.
She added that the pump that operated the heart-lung machine had 344 pieces — all of which had to be sterilized and reassembled after each surgery.
The heart-lung machine was cutting edge for its time but some other OR items were rather mundane.
“We had maintenance bring in a rubber tub that fit on a gurney,” Bradfield recalled.
“After the patient was anesthetized, we actually put wet towels on them and iced them down to lower their temperatures.”
The only way to stop the heart then was by hypothermia. Then, as now, when the surgery was completed the heart was shocked into beating again.
“We literally packed them in ice,” Schreck said.
“We didn’t pump the blood back into the machine — we used gravity,” Weinert said. “So the patient was as high as the operating table would go and I had to be as low as I could go so the blood would drain into the pump and we could pump it back into the patient.
“I spent four years on my knees on the terrazzo floor,” she said.
The team relied on fresh blood — drawn that morning from at least 50 donors.
“We had our own blood bank,” Bradfield said.
Bradfield was the “go-fer” on the team that day, and one of her responsibilities was orange juice and lemon drops.
“There were no breaks. We had orange juice with bent straws and we would slip it behind their masks so they could have a little liquid. Then I would give them sour lemon drops for a little bit of energy.”
Surgeries usually lasted 12 to 13 hours.
Monitoring equipment was almost nonexistent in those days and there was no intensive care unit. Patients were sent to Recovery where they would stay for a week or more.
“We had a dog lab,” Cartwright said. “The doctors learned a lot of the procedures in the dog lab before they ever touched a patient.”
“It was a new feeling for us. We knew it had to be perfect,” Bradfield said.
“We have come a long way,” Schreck said.
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