Categories
Article

How can you mend a beating heart? Read on.

Nov. 2, 1998

Thirty-six hours after open heart surgery, some people are still hooked up to oxygen, IV’s and monitors. Tony Anastasio felt like his surgery never happened.

That’s because the three bypasses performed on him by surgeon Vasant B. Khachane, M.D., were done through a revolutionary new procedure that allows doctors to operate on a beating heart. Called “beating heart bypass”, the technique shortens a patient’s recovery time and significantly reduces the potential for post-operative complications, such as stroke, bleeding, infection, memory loss, and pneumonia. Fewer blood transfusions and medications are needed, and the patient is “under” anesthesia fewer hours.

“I’m ready to go home,” the 67-year-old Bethany man says less than two days after undergoing the surgery at Saint Raphael’s. “Who’d ever know that I just had three bypasses? I feel great.”

“And he looks good too,” smiles Anne, his wife of 40 years.

During traditional heart bypass surgery, the patient is placed on a heart-lung machine that oxygenates and circulates blood, and the heart is stopped.

Medications are administered to keep the blood thin and moving, and to maintain normal blood pressure. Patients are placed on a respirator for hours after surgery, and they must stay in a specialized intensive care unit for 24 to 48 hours. That’s followed by a three-to five-day stay in a cardiac hospital unit.

With beating heart bypass, surgery is performed with special instruments that allow the heart to keep beating. Just a small tube is needed for the patient to breathe. And in most cases, this tube can come out as soon as the operation is done, before the patient is transferred to an intensive care unit.

“Patients can benefit enormously from the procedure,” says Khachane, section chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Saint Raphael’s. He’s one of only a handful of surgeons in the state who perform the beating heart bypass. “It offers nothing but positives.”

Attached only to a small heart monitor? which looks more like a portable CD player than a medical device? Anastasio was walking hospital halls, joking with nurses, just 24 hours after his surgery began. He teased his wife; took a phone call from his 2-year-old grandson.

The patient who had traditional bypass surgery the same time Anastasio had his procedure was still in intensive care.

“It’s remarkable,” Khachane adds.

“There’s something calming about the fact that your heart will never stop beating in this operation,” Anastasio says. “It eased the fear of going into surgery, which is always scary.”

Reprinted with permission from the November/December issue of Better Health magazine, published bimonthly by the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven.