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2010年4月6日のアーカイブ

オーディオブック King of Hearts

King of Hearts

I started listening to an audio book about the history of open heart surgery. It is amazing how fast the technology has developed over the past few decades. Back in the 1940’s, congenital heart diseases were fatal. Many children born with heart diseases couldn’t make it to their adulthood because there were no radical treatments for them.

Surgeons experimented on dogs in an attic room of the university, then tried with patients.There were many on-table deaths at first, but desperate parents with dying children had no alternative but to pin a chance on the erratic procedures.

A baby girl who was diagnosed to have a simple defect in her upper heart chamber turned out to have complex abnormalities and died in a pool of blood. Misdiagnoses often occurred as the medical equipment was not good enough at that time. And also, the artificial heart-lung machines were prone to errors.

Dismal as it was, I want to know how surgeons overcame all those difficulties and established techniques in the end.

オーディオブック[King of Hearts] を聴き始めました。1940年台にopen heart surgeryを始めた外科医のお話。物事になんでも始めはあるわけだけど、生きている人間の心臓を手術するというのはとても勇気のいることだと思いました。最初のころは失敗につぐ失敗。出血が止まらず血しぶきが吹き上げる様子や、初期の人工心肺の操作ミスから全身の血管に空気が入ってしまうアクシデントまで、身も凍るような失敗話ばかりです。

それでも失敗を恐れずリスクをとり続けたことで今の技術が確立されたわけで、諦めない気持ちが大事だと思いました。なかなかスリリングな本です。血が苦手な人は無理かも。