What was it like to undergo surgery at ‘Heart Center of the Central Coast’ 36 years ago?
The patient’s heart stopped cold. Monitors flatlined. The beeping pulse sounds went silent.
There was no panic, no dramatic shouts of “Code Blue!” Everything was all going to plan.
A heart-lung machine took over while surgeons began to methodically bypass arteries on what moments before had been a beating heart.
That was my introduction to photographing the highly choreographed life-saving heart bypass procedure.
I have photographed memorable stories at French Hospital Medical Center in San Luis Obispo, including a knee replacement surgery, the catheterization lab and the emergency room.
The hospital celebrates its 75th anniversary this month.
According to a news release, Dr. Edison French bought the San Luis Sanatorium building in 1946 — still standing at 1160 Marsh St. — and established French Hospital.
The post-World War II era was a time of rapid change in heath knowledge, technology and economic consolidation.
Health organizations that have specialized, adapted and grown over the past three-quarters of a century have thrived while others are no longer on the scene.
In 1972, French Hospital opened a new facility on Johnson Avenue, where it’s located today.
When heart surgery became a local specialty, Telegram-Tribune reporter Ann Fairbanks pursued telling a patient’s story for three years before finding someone willing to share their journey.
She succeeded in covering the procedure with photographer Doug Parker in 1984. I covered the same story 24 years later.
I couldn’t find Parker’s black-and-white photos from her story, so the color photos used here are from the surgery I covered more two decades later. The names of the doctors and patient depicted in the pictures are not the same as the ones in the story.
On Sept. 13 and 14, 1984, the Telegram-Tribune published Fairbanks’ two part series introducing a heart bypass surgery and recovery — a process that we almost take for granted today. This is the first part, excerpted for length.
Repairing the heart
The pulsating blade of a small electric saw buzzed through Bob Brown’s breastbone while one of three surgeons sliced open his thigh.
Beginning just below the groin, Dr. Robert A. Danielson glided a scalpel through the shaved skin and yellow globules of subcutaneous fat.
With forceps that looked like very long eyebrow tweezers, the surgeon located the leg vein that would be sewn into Brown’s heart by Drs. Eugene A. Mazzei and James R. Skow.
Snipping the vein away from the tissue, the doctor extended the incision as he worked heading past the knee while gently extracting a 15-inch length of what’s essentially a spare vein.
Meanwhile, Mazzei turned the crank on a metal retractor, pulling apart Brown’s chest. He sliced open the pericardial sac — an 8-by-8inch cavity in which the heart sits — exposing the organ that would be the focus of three hours of painstaking and detailed labor by two cardiovascular thoracic surgeons, an assistant surgeon, three nurses, an anesthesiologist and two technicians and special equipment operators.
Brown — a 57-year-old Atascadero resident, advertising consultant and former owner and manager of KVEC Radio — was undergoing triple bypass heart surgery.
The 390th open heart surgery at French Hospital — billed as “The Heart Center of the Central Coast” — began at 11 a.m. June 27.
Up until a week-and-a-half before the surgery, heart disease hadn’t entered Brown’s mind.
While moving some light lawn furniture one Saturday late in June, he “just pooped out.”
“I was out of breath, I broke out in a cold sweat, I felt lightheaded and my arms were really bothering me,” Brown recalled.
“We tend to write things off to something else,” he said. “I kept telling myself this was gas.”
“I flunked the treadmill test,” Brown said.
Deposits of fat and cholesterol had completely plugged one of the arteries lying on the surface of his heart. Another was narrowed by 90%. And the third one was 40% clogged.
Less than a week later, surgeon Mazzei was bending over Brown’s open chest, performing one of the hospital’s three to five weekly heart surgeries.
“The heart is going to stop in a matter of seconds,” Skow explained as he squeezed a spongeworth of iced saline solution into Brown’s pericardial sac.
Via tubes, Brown’s blood was being funneled directly into the machine — commonly called the “pump” — where it was cooled and oxygenated and returned to his body, bypassing his heart and lungs for 1 1/2 hours.
Even as they worked, blood from the chest cavity was suctioned into a cell saver, a machine monitored by technician Pete Pascal that washes the blood and saves it to return to the patient after surgery. The retrieved blood — 3 to 5 pints — nearly eliminates the need for transfusions.
Within an hour, the bypasses were completed and Brown was ready to go off the heart-lung machine. All eyes in the operating room turned to the monitors’ screens, watching the flat lines turn to squiggies as Brown’s heart and lungs took back their jobs.
The surgeons then checked the meter measuring he blood flow through Brown’s previously occluded vessels. The grafts had worked.
The retractor was taken off his chest. Leaving wisps of smoke behind, the surgeons cauterized bleeders with a minutely focused electrical current and spread a form of beeswax on the sternum to control bleeding.
The delicate part of the surgery was over. Now Mazzei had to push five stainless steel wires through each side of Brown’s sternum, piercing the bone, pulling up the wire ends and twisting them together like a twistie on a plastic bag.
The nurses took a final tally to ensure that the 65 bloody sponges — all lined up on the floor — and the 150 instruments used in the surgery were all accounted for.
Brown’s chest was stitched up. All hands then quickly peeled the drapes and plastic wrap off Brown’s body. His incisions were wrapped in gauze and his body in blankets.
Mazzei pulled off his headlamp and Rajan, the anesthesiologist, leaned over Brown and said in a loud voice:
“Open your eyes, Mr. Brown. Take a deep breath. Your operation is all over.
“Everything is fine.”
