The Man on the Table Was 97, but He Devised the Surgery

Caption: The Patient Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, seated, became the oldest patient to benefit from heart surgery he devised. From left are Carlos Hinojosa Salcedo, an aide; Kenneth Miller, a physical therapist; and Dr. George P. Noon, Dr. DeBakey’s surgical partner.

This article from the NY Times was definitely an interesting read.

Over the past 60 years, Dr. DeBakey has changed the way heart surgery is performed. He was one of the first to perform coronary bypass operations. He trained generations of surgeons at the Baylor College of Medicine; operated on more than 60,000 patients; and in 1996 was summoned to Moscow by Boris Yeltsin, then the president of Russia, to aid in his quintuple heart bypass operation.Now Dr. DeBakey is making history in a different way — as a patient. He was released from Methodist Hospital in Houston in September and is back at work. At 98, he is the oldest survivor of his own operation, proving that a healthy man of his age could endure it.

What happened?

1. “sharp pain ripped through his upper chest and between his shoulder blades, then moved into his neck.”

2. his heart kept beating (you would have thought it was going to an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) or in simple terms, a heart attack)

Diagnosis?
dissecting aortic aneurysm
“a ballooning had probably weakened the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart, and that the inner lining of the artery had torn”

Good read, especially when next year i would be moving onto cardiothoracic physio and anat.