Christopher Jordan’s Post

In 1954, the legendary cardiac surgeon C. Walton Lillehei and his colleagues performed the world’s first successful open-heart surgery using a new method called cross-circulation that they had pioneered. The technique ended up forever changing medicine, leading to developments that now save thousands of children’s lives every year. One of Lillehei’s residents, Herbert E. Warden, had come up with the idea for cross-circulation when contemplating one of the many biological marvels of pregnancy—the way the placenta works to oxygenate a fetus’s blood. It occurred to him that if doctors could find a similar way to oxygenate and pump blood for a baby during heart surgery, a surgeon like him would have time to make a repair. Instead of a placenta, however, Warden thought to use another person as the oxygenator and pump. For the first cross-circulation surgeries, doctors would connect blood flow between a baby and his or her parent in the operating room. The parent’s body would pump the baby’s blood, keeping it oxygenated while surgeons made the repair. The idea of using a baby’s mother or father as a human bypass machine was ingenious. It also demonstrated a quality that we still see every day at Inova: The awe-inspiring selflessness and courage of mothers and fathers who prioritize the wellbeing of their children above all, including their own health. Cardiology has advanced dramatically since Lillehei’s day, but the origins of open-heart surgery are a reminder that a doctor is never treating just one patient. At Inova Children’s Cardiology, and in our Genetic Cardiology clinic, our Cardiogenomics team treats the whole family. #Inova #8th world congress #cardiogenetics #chdawareness #national wear red day Inova Health System 8th World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery 2023