Positivity: Doctor and Nurse Literally Hold Man’s Life in His Hands, and Saves Him
Can you imagine holding a man’s heart in your heart and squeezing it to keep its owner alive? Dr. Andrew Brown and an attending nurse did just that:
Doctor meets patient whose life he literally held in his hand
Associated Press
February 4, 2006EAST CHICAGO, Ind. - A doctor who held a stabbing victim’s heart in his hand for an hour, trading places with nurses to plug a quarter-size hole in the organ, reunited last week with the man, whom he says he never expected to live.
On the night of Jan. 22, Andrew Brown, a third-year attending physician at St. Catherine Hospital, received a call from paramedics saying they were bringing in a man who had been stabbed in the heart, allegedly by his girlfriend.
When Tyray Tolbert, 20, arrived at St. Catherine, Brown said he knew the case was desperate.
With Tolbert’s blood pressure falling, Brown made an incision, spread Tolbert’s ribs and pulled his heart out of the chest cavity. When he flipped the heart over, blood sprayed more than 6 feet from a hole the size of a quarter.
Brown said he had opened patient’s chests before, but it was generally a futile step.
“I remember thinking that one day it will work out. … I’ll make a difference in someone’s life,” Brown said.
Over the next hour, while emergency department staff awaited the surgeons’ arrival, Tolbert’s heart stopped at least three times. Each time, Brown, still holding the heart in his hand, would gently squeeze and massage it to get it going again.
He soon realized that he needed to patch the hole, so he switched places with a nurse, who held the heart and plugged the hole with her finger as Brown stitched around it. Blood spurted from the hole periodically, spraying Brown and the nurse.
When Brown returned to the room later, he found the blood that sprayed toward him and the nurse had created an outline of their bodies on the wall behind where they had been labored.
When he started losing hope, Brown said the nurses told him, “We made it this far, keep going.” He credits the entire 12-person staff for saving Tolbert, including the unit clerk who kept running back and forth to bring more and more bags of blood.
Tolbert received blood infusions totaling almost 16 pints - far more than the 10 pints of blood most people have in their bodies.
Dr. Cris Carlos, who worked another surgeon to repair Tolbert’s left ventricle and his lung, said the majority of patients with injuries like Tolbert’s die.
Carlos said all the measures each member of the emergency department took, including Brown “keeping his finger in the dike,” saved Tolbert’s life.
On Friday, Tolbert, Brown and Carlos reunited in a conference room at St. Catherine Hospital. As Tolbert listened to Brown describe how he put his finger inside the hole in his heart, he was nearly speechless, hanging his head at times.
“I just thank the doctors and the hospital a lot for saving my life,” he said.
