I found some Halloween - Heart trivia for you! Because I can relate anything to the heart! I found this article from a friend of mine, a fellow TGA Mama, and wanted to pass on the information! This is how the portable pacemaker came about!
A little backround on what was going on in Cardiac Surgery World: they had just started using pacemakers to help kids recover from open heart surgery. They plugged into the wall socket and were pretty big.
Well - on Halloween night in 1957 there was a HUGE blackout affecting most of Minnesota and the western part of Wisconsin. There was no power for 3 hours. "For most, the blackout was just an inconvenience. But for a few young heart patients connected to pacemakers it was life threatening". Jack Norton, a historian, found a newpaper article that described what went on in the hospital during that blackout.
"They had police officers pull up to the side of the surgery suites and simply turn on their headlights to provide light for the surgeons. They scrambled to try to keep blood cold by grabbing ice from various coolers to stick in the blood refrigerator. Doctors scrambled to find drugs to keep their patients hearts pumping" he recalls.
Not one child survived.
The trauma of that event rattled pioneering heart surgery C Walter Lillehei. The next day in the hospital hallway he flagged down Early Bakken, an electrical engineer who was working with hospital surgeons on new medical devices - working OUT OF HIS GARAGE. The two agreed that there needed to be a way to back up the pacemakers when there was a power failure. The children would have survived the three hours had the pacemakers worked.
Lillehei asked Bakken if he knew how to make a pacemaker than ran on a battery. After some tweaking they came up with a device that was about the size of a paperback book and fit in the patients bed. Bakken tested it out on a lab dog and saw that it worked. He said "Ok now, this seems to work so I'll go back to my garage and make a pacemaker for humans".
But he never got the chance! When Bakken went to work the next day, he saw Lilliehei using it in the recovery room of a CHILD. Bakken was not convinced that it was ready for human use yet and questioned Lillehei about why he didn't wait for the "people version" of the pacemaker.
Lillehei says "As long as this battery operated pacemaker is avaiable, I'm not going to risk using another child to a power failure".
Can you imagine if that happened now?! It wouldn't! Too many politics and law suits! Too bad - I wonder how much creativity is being shut down because of red tape!
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