When Minutes Mean Lives
March 24th, 2004The patient had just suffered his second heart attack.
The first had been about a year earlier. Doctors at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco saved him then, with cardiac catheterization and angiography: Carefully, they slid a thin, flexible tube, or catheter, through an incision in the patient’s thigh, up through the femoral artery toward the heart. With dye and X-rays, they located areas of fat and calcium that blocked off the heart’s blood supply. Then they sent small, tough, balloons through the same vascular tunnel, and, inflating them at just the right spots, relieved the obstructions.
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