Thursday, November 20, 2008

Living with no heart

The other day as I went on my email to check my mail, the homepage had some recent news stories and a specific one caught my eye. The heading said "Teen girl lives 4 months with no heart, leaves hospital." As soon and I read that, I knew I would be interested in this article. I clicked on the link and read the article. I was so interested in this topic i decided to search for another article and found one from ABC. This article is about a 14 year old who was living with no heart for 118 days. She had 2 heart transplants and the doctors decided to do something vary unusual and that was to insert artificial heart pumps which made blood flow through her body. This is absolutely amazing to me. What do you think? Is this a Miracle? 

3 comments:

Matt L. said...

This is a miracle but, I thinks eventually these artificial hearts will become more common. Just as other technologies have over the years

Kimber said...

I agree its scary to think of a person living without a heart.. how could you survive? It is awesome that an artivicial heart was used becuase currently there are not enough heart donations to be used in transplants. If these artificial hearts are able to fulfill the smae functions that an actual heart does, then doctors are going to be save many more lives. On the other hand, after reading the article and hearing that for the four months that she livied with an artificial heart she had major breathing trouble, kidney failure, liver failure, and gastrointestinal bleeding, it is apparent that we still need to work on finding a better method.

Abby said...

I remember doing a report on artifical hearts in junior high and I remember reading that they are very risky and they're usually never used for kids. So I do think that she was incredibly lucky to have survived, even with the medical problems that it caused her afterwards. I also agree on what Matt said, that artificial hearts will become more common and less risky to use.