I’m too sick today to visit the hospital and haven’t yet been able to talk to a doctor or nurse, but my family is telling me that grampa’s double bypass was done yesterday without stopping the heart. I was under the impression that the heart HAD to be stopped to do the bypass. I’m slow so I’m going to assume I’m wrong, but how do they do a bypass with the heart still beating?
Very carefully!
Seriously I’m a bit out-dated in my cardiac surgery techniques, not having participated since med school. But I do know that there are a number of techniques that allow bypassing certain types of coronary lesions without stopping the heart. Some can even be done thru a laparoscope!!
If possible to do it that way, it is a godsend. It is tremendously wearing on a patient, and causes not a small amount of morbidity to stop the heart, go on heart-lung bypass for hours, and restart it.
In the cases where it can be done that way, the heart is stabilized as far as possible and the surgeon has to take the remaining movement into account. It is somewhat more difficult, but it has benefits for the patient.
Here is a bit of explanation:
(There is some debate on how advantageous this procedure is in which cases, I chose the site mostly for the picture, not the advocacy)
Oh, and everything I know about that is only second-hand from my father who does that for a living (with and without heart-lung machine.)
Ha! I’ll bet. 
Thanks for the info, guys…appreciate it.
In theory it reduced the risks of neurological deficits that some bypass patients suffer. Tiny clots form in the blood as it’s processed by the heart lung machine, and nearly half of patients have their cognition affected over the long term.