The Ten Second Miracle.
The ten second miracle is something we all depended on when we started cardiac surgery. There were no data on unusual situations because no surgeon wanted to be known as having complications, and if we didn’t figure out the answer, the patient would die. One example was an “egg shell aorta”, in which the wall has been replaced with a thin layer of calcium. Putting a side-biting clamp on the aortic wall to sew in the frafts resulted in fracture of the aortic wall and massive bleeding. I stopped most of the blood loss by packing the area with lap pads, and wondered how I would be able sew in an aortic replacemenr. The message came through loid and clear: drop the temperature and stop the pump. I dropped the temp to 17degrees C. and replaced the aorta from the valve to the right arm branch. Then we restarted the pump and heating the blood while I used a side biting clamp on the prosthetic aorta to sew in the grafts. His course thereafter was uneventful. Everyone had cases like this, and word of mouth at meetings was the way news was spread. One had to get to the men who had the largest volume, and just listen!
