[مع الله]

Man Without a Pulse

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Ed Layton is happy just to be able to get his own mail. For the last 10 years he walked nine miles a day delivering other peoples letters, until...
"I just grabbed my chest," Layton says. "I was dying. The heart attack blew a hole in my heart."
"[The heart attack] was big enough that it did so much damage to his heart that we weren't going to bring it back," Benjamin Sun, M.D., a cardiothoracic surgeon at Ohio State University in Columbus, tells Ivanhoe.
Even still, Dr. Sun is bringing Layton's heart back to life. The result?
"I have no pulse. You can't feel a pulse," Layton says. That's because of a seven-pound heart pump that does the work of Layton's heart 24 hours a day.
"The neat thing is that they are very small. They are virtually silent," Dr. Sun says.
The CardioWest temporary, Total Artificial Heart, or TAH-t, consists of two ventricles connected to the pulmonary artery and aorta. An air hose passes through each, forcing blood to circulate throughout the body.
Dr. Sun likens their constant spinning to a high-speed rotor. The pump is attached to batteries outside the body and is portable so patients don't have to stay in the hospital. It can last for two to three years, giving patients waiting for a heart transplant more time.
"It's an athlete, the heart, which has been damaged, so we rest it," Dr. Sun says. "It's like putting it on the couch so it gets better."
Layton is feeling stronger every day. "I'm out of the hospital, and I survived what you call the widow maker," he says.
The standard LVADs are bigger, and pump less blood through the body, putting more vital organs at risk. Also, unlike the LVADs used today, the new Total Artificial Heart is portable and allows heart patients to go home from the hospital while waiting on a transplant.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com