Heres what happens in an #openheart12 surgery. Because the heart has to be cut into, something else needs to take over the functions of injecting oxygen into the blood and pushing the blood round the body. A heart lung machine does that. Surgeons fit cannulas into the patients heart to take blood away into the heart lung machine and then pump in a potassium rich compound to stop the heart. Then they can get into work. But the machine takes on the role of the heart in a sort of bypass. It adds oxygen to the blood from the heart, now stored within it, and then pumps it around the body in the same manner as the heart.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 11:03:20 +0000
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