This photograph shows Polish heart surgeon, Zbigniew Religa, after a 23 hours long heart transplant

[dipsydoodle]

His assistant is sleeping on the floor (1987).

Today more than 5,000 heart transplants are performed around the world every year, and the surgery takes just 6 hours.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Science? We don't need no science when we've got gawd's word. Don't

you ever wonder how people who refuse to believe the age of the earth, that dinosaurs didn't exist with people, or we have ever touched the moon, deal with medical knowledge?

[enough]

2. Yes, and how they mentally deal with their telephones, computers, cars,

airplanes, gps, etc. etc. etc.

[n2doc]

5. It's always a miracle to them

Always, God has stepped in and made things right! Never mind the other stuff.

[Arugula Latte]

7. ...and never considering why their god either caused or failed to prevent

the bad stuff in the first place.

[n2doc]

8. bad stuff happens for a reason

and the reasoning is God's. Whose mind is unknowable. Otherwise known as a Nice and neat way of saying "shut up and stop bugging me about it".

[Warpy]

3. I'm always amazed by the longevity of some transplant patients

since antirejection drug protocols have been fine tuned and new drugs have come through the pipeline. Five years used to be average, then ten, and now twenty. Younger patients tend to do better than older patients and I'm anticipating seeing the longevity pushed to 30, 35, 40 years.

But yes, the surgery is a marathon for the surgeons involved. The postop bedside equipment has gotten considerably smaller but the hoses are still the same.

Seeing a doc who's been up for over 24 hours and propped up in a corner is pretty common for these surgeries.

[MurryMom]

4. transplant surgeons

My neighbor is a transplant surgeon - colons, livers, etc.
Hardest working guy in the neighborhood.

[Warpy]

9. The hours are especially brutal

because he's the surgeon who has to be on call at all times to deal with problems that come up. Problems always come up, too, even during the most benign recoveries.

Some day, all this will be seen as barbaric, new organs grown within the human body from stem cells that replace the cells in the failing organ. For now, the transplant surgeons are worth every dime of their usual 7 figure incomes.

[catchnrelease]

10. Star Trek!

I don't remember most of the details, but I think it was in the first ST movie, where the crew had to go into the past to correct something. While walking through a hospital Dr McCoy talks to an old woman that is going to have a kidney transplant and he makes a comment about how barbaric that is. Then he gives her some kind of pill (I think) which causes her to grow a new kidney.

I hope you are right Warpy, and this idea will be real before too long.

[Liberalagogo]

11. It was

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

[jakeXT]

13. Kidney Dialysis

[catchnrelease]

16. Yes, that's the one.

Dialysis not transplant. Thanks for the flash back!

[LibDemAlways]

6. My mother-in-law died at the age of 40 in 1963 because the

technology that we take for granted today didn't exist. She went into the hospital a full month before her open heart surgery was scheduled and died on the table.

Today she'd have an excellent chance of living a long and full life.

My dad had a good friend who lived for 20 years after his heart transplant. He died at 80 from an unrelated cause.

The strides made in medicine in the last half century are amazing.

[freshwest]

12. My dad died a few years after your MIL and it was mainly because he could not get insurance no

matter how much he paid because he'd had a heart attack before and it was a pre-existing condition.

My father didn't have the $90,000 in cash they wanted for it before the surgery. And they said his survival chances were only 50%. So he stayed at home and died.

That won't be happening now with the ACA in place. He could have paid a lot for insurance but they denied him. So I'm very glad for those who get coverage and don't have to deal with this now.

[DetlefK]

14. 23 hours? Wow. Here are some side-effects:

- The soles of your feet hurt so much, you can barely stand and walk. (Lasts about 12 more hours.)
- Pain in your back.
- You get mild spasms in the craziest places: forearm, biceps, triceps, eyelids, lower leg...
- You switch mentally to autopilot after a while and just do your job (by blindly following the knowledge and motions you are familiar with), but you loose the capacity to handle sudden problems that aren't part of that task.

Been there, done that (and longer), but at least the life of a human never depended on my performance.

[tblue37]

15. My daughter (a doctor) had assumed she would specialize in some

sort of surgery. But her surgical rotation convinced her not to. It was the !7-hour surgeries that changed her mind.