Word: ventricular
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...crises in affairs of the heart are more dreaded by physician, surgeon and patient alike than ventricular fibrillation -in which the heart's built-in electrical timing system fails and its lower chambers flutter futilely. Instead of beating purposefully and pumping blood to the whole body, they twitch ineffectively and pump nothing. There is no heartbeat. Doctors have tried to reverse the rapidly fatal process with a variety of electronic gadgets, but until recently no defibrillator has been able to do the job consistently. Now, some daring and resourceful doctors have become so sure they can restore a twitching...
...curtain-raiser, the Guild offered Menotti's The Telephone (1947), an oft-done two-character farce about a lad on the make for a lass; but, alas, her auricular and ventricular concerns are maddeningly telephonic...
What happened next was one more striking example of how a cool, quickwitted doctor can often cheat death with only the most rudimentary tools. The surgeon quickly sliced open the chest cavity to massage the heart, but it went into ventricular fibrillation, a useless twitching that is fatal unless the heart is shocked back into a normal beat. An electric defibrillator was needed. St. Margaret's had none, but Dr. Jacobs knew what...
...recent delicate pulmonary-valve operation at Denver's National Jewish Hospital, was recovering normally. Unpublished so far, the technique originated this summer with Physiologist Baruch Bromberger, 40, and Dr. Paolo Caldini, 30, an Italian physician working in the U.S. on a Fulbright grant. They went to work on ventricular fibrillation, which is still a grave danger when a patient's body is cooled for heart surgery (hypothermia). The cooling itself protects the brain from lack of oxygen (anoxia), has greatly advanced modern heart surgery. But hearts cooled to an average 28° C. during hypothermia also become highly...
...support the family. When the son abruptly left home to join the Navy, the father felt hopeless and his condition worsened. After the son wrote that he would not come home on his first furlough, the father wound up in the hospital. A day later he died of ventricular fibrillation...