On January 19, the fifteen SAR HS students who participated in the Bio Challenge option last summer were privileged to attend open heart surgery through the Liberty Science Center’s Cardiac Classroom Live program.
When they entered the amphitheater, students were told that the operation would be a coronary bypass operation on a 70 year old man who was an extensive smoker. The surgeon, Dr. Slater, told them that he would not know exactly how many bypasses he would have to do until he examined the beating heart once the chest cavity was opened. The students watched as he cut through the skin and muscle of the chest cavity, sawed open the sternum, cut through the pericardium and quickly lifted the beating heart to determine that he would need to do three bypasses of clogged coronary arteries.
The students continued to watch as the heart was stopped and the blood was rerouted through the heart lung machine. As Dr. Slater spoke to them and explained the procedures he was doing, they saw the physician’s assistant, Kim, remove the saphenous vein from the patient’s leg in order to use it to do two of the bypasses. She then flushed out the vein handed it to the surgeon whom she subsequently assisted as he cut the vein and sewed it into two of the areas that had to be bypassed and used the internal mammary artery to complete the final bypass. They then watched the restoration of the heartbeat and closing up of the chest cavity and skin—all in just under two and a half hours!
The surgery was video-cast live on a large screen from Morristown Hospital. The students had been introduced to the surgeon, the perfusionist who was in charge of operating the heart lung machine, the physician’s assistant and the nurses who assisted in the operation.
Throughout the operation, the students asked questions of the surgeon and other medical team members and were able to see the procedures up close, as the camera zoomed in, for example, on the stitching together of the bypass vessels. In addition, the staff at the Liberty Science Center passed around the instruments and sutures being used in the operation for the students to hold.
Some of the students’ questions included: How does the heart continue to live if the heart itself won’t be getting blood from the heart lung machine? How could you tell so quickly that the patient needed three bypasses done? Why don’t you close the pericardium fully after the operation? Do the metal wires used to close the sternum come out after awhile? The students were amazed by what they saw.
Attendance at the surgery was the culminating event for students who had gone beyond the course-work in ninth grade biology to participate in the Biology Challenge option. As part of the challenge option they read and wrote papers analyzing the biography/autobiography of a scientist whose research was studied in the course.
