Every once in a while someone will express the opinion that things were soooo much better in the “good old days.” No, they weren’t.
I am very happy today because this month my newest grandson is growing and learning to smile. A month ago he was dying. Born with a heart defect (endocardial cushion defect), he was expending so much energy trying to breathe and keep his heart beating that he had nothing left to grow with. He was becoming weaker and weaker, too weak to cry, and too weak to nurse well.
Just over two weeks ago he underwent open heart surgery to fix the problem. He’s now thriving. The surgeons put him on a heart/lung machine, opened up his chest, removed his heart from his body, and reconstructed the inside of it to give him normal function. All this on a baby that’s maybe 7 pounds. I imagine his heart was the size of an adult’s thumb.
We are also glad that there is a hospital within a two-hour drive that does this surgery regularly.
In the “good old days” there would have been no answer; we would have watched him fade away and die.
Yep, some amazing things can be done. I started nursing 35 years ago, and the changes that I saw over my career were just astounding.
Just one, is the treatment for aortic aneurysm (a bulging of the main artery on the body, sort of like a tire tube with an incipient blowout) which used to be horrendously dangerous open surgery, with a high fatality rate. Now is very often done as a minimally invasive procedure with a catheter inserted into the groin artery.
MLS, heartwarming story and maybe this will help for the future.
My niece was born just before Thanksgiving. About 3-4 days after she was born I got a call from my brother, who said “my baby has a hole in her heart, they are operating in two days, take care of my house and dog.” (they were moving to the same city I lived in). So I took care of locking up the house, kenneled the dog, and headed to the hospital 300 miles away.
My niece is now in Graduate school, doing the things all 20-somethings do (albeit while mothering a 170lb English Mastiff).
So yes, the “Good old days” of measles, rubella, polio, and heart conditions we could do nothing about that have killed children for ages past, are gone (at least for most of the First World…we’re getting there for the rest).
What’s also amazing to me is that in simpler defects, when the hole is only between the atria or only between the ventricles, the surgery is minimally invasive these days, and does not even require much of a hospital stay.
A few decades ago, when I was teaching 9th grade English, the students were reading an inspirational story about a person who had survived polio and went on to great achievements. In the story the disease was named “infantile paralysis” with a footnote to explain it as polio. This was no help at all to my students, none of whom had ever heard of this illness. Finally someone remembered her baby brother getting a polio vaccine. Isn’t that great? Something parents used to dread is now barely even heard of.
My wife’s cousin is a pediatric electrocardiologist - as my primitive brain understands it, he helps kids with irregular heartbeats, often by implanting a pacemaker device (or a series of them as the kid grows). I love hearing him talk about his little patients. Amazing!
The modern medicine I am thankful for is anasthesia. Whenever I see pictures of surgical patients in the days before anesthesia, being held down by strong men while the surgeon is cutting.
