Print

Mail

wiki links

Patient lives without heart for 16 days

Chen Chi-chung (陳麒鐘) is an extremely lucky man. After all, who else could claim to have survived for 16 days without a heart?

This is exactly what happened to Chen in late February after doctors at National Taiwan University (NTU) Hospital were forced to remove his heart when he became severely ill after catching a cold.

At a press conference held by the NTU Hospital on Monday, doctors said this was the first such case in the history of transplant surgery, with no other example in medical documentation.

Chen, an otherwise healthy 60-year-old man, caught a cold in January. Soon afterwards, he started to feel pain in his back and legs, and suffered from a loss of appetite. His condition then quickly deteriorated; he had trouble breathing and sleeping.

On February 12, an ultrasound examination showed that his heart had been damaged by an infection.

The following day, Chen developed pulmonary edema and heart failure, and emergency surgery had to be performed.

When the surgeon in the hospital in southern Taiwan, where Chen was being treated, began to operate, it was discovered that Chen's heart had been destroyed by bacteria.

After talking over the circumstance with the Chen family, it was decided that the entire heart should be removed and that Chen be put on an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, which could take over the functions of his heart until a donor heart was found.

An important factor in this unprecedented decision was that Chen's son is a doctor and for this reason doctors dared take the risk of removing the heart before a replacement had been found.

When NTU Hospital received the request for help from the southern hospital, it immediately sent an ambulance to take Chen to Taipei. Sixteen days later, a donor heart became available and put into Chen's empty chest during a six-hour operation.

Chen and his wife expressed their sincere thanks to the doctors, the donor and the donor's family.

Doctors believe that Chen's heart problems may be related to a bacterial infection caused by a periodontal disease.
This story has been viewed 1697 times.