THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 20, 1994 TAG: 9409200322
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By PATRICK K. LACKEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
Dr. Donald Drew got to wondering recently how many times the two mechanical valves inside Vivian Wingate's heart have opened and closed.
The titanium valves were implanted 18,500 open-heart surgeries ago at what was then Norfolk General Hospital, back in 1968, when Wingate was 24. It was the first valve implant in Eastern Virginia, and some physicians were pleasantly surprised to learn Wingate's heart is still ticking, though ever more weakly since her health worsened in February.
Both valves, inserted between the two chambers of the heart in a six-hour operation, open and close with every heartbeat. They open to let blood be pumped forward, close to prevent its return.
Drew, a Norfolk cardiologist who took part in Wingate's operation, estimated that her heart beats 70 times a minute. He calculated beats per hour, 4,200, and beats per day, 100,800, and beats per year, 36,792,000.
Multiply the annual beats times 26 years and you get 956,592,000.
Given that 70 beats a minute is a conservative estimate for a weak heart, throw in six leap-year days, and the valves may very well have opened and closed a billion times apiece, a number seldom used except in discussions of the national debt or conversations with Carl Sagan.
Wingate's husband, Thomas, says that when she gets mad, her heart, normally quiet, sounds like the valves on a car engine.
A couple of years after the operation, Wingate was the highlight of a press conference held to dramatize the wonders of modern medicine and raise money for Eastern Virginia Medical School.
Then local medical history pretty much forgot her. When the 10,000th open-heart surgery was performed at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in 1984, no mention was made of her pioneering operation.
This summer, Virginian-Pilot photographer Richard L. Dunston bumped into Wingate and remembered photographing her in 1968. Like some of the physicians who knew her then, he was delighted she was still alive, and he photographed her again.
Wingate said she would like to be remembered as a pioneer patient, one with the guts to say, ``Go ahead and operate,'' when surgeons were having second thoughts. They had hoped for a healthier candidate for the first operation, and she was told her survival chances were maybe 50-50.
``I asked the Lord to show me if the operation was for me to have,'' Wingate said. ``He never did, and he never didn't.''
She decided to trust God and her fellow man and to have the operation. ``If you don't trust your fellow man,'' she said, ``you don't have a chance anyway.''
Thomas Wingate remembered doctors asking him to have his wife reconsider. ``They didn't want to do it,'' he said, ``but she was so enthused. The doctors were real scared, but she had the faith.''
``I remember trying to talk her out of it in some degree,'' recalled Dr. Bruce Innes, the lead surgeon. ``She was so sick and so short of breath.''
Dr. Innes, now of Macon, Ga., was one of 15 people involved in the operation.
Wingate's heart had been bad since she had rheumatic fever at age 13 in South Mills, N.C., a burg near Elizabeth City. Taking frequent rests, she was able to complete high school. Others carried her books. She sat with her legs propped on a stool to lessen swelling.
``Thank God I made it through high school,'' she said. ``I would get shortness of breath real bad.''
She dreamed of attending college, but her family wouldn't let her because of her health.
She married and amazingly had one son.
At age 24, her beleaguered heart was twice normal size, Dr. Innes recalled.
Before the operation, Wingate had to sleep sitting up in order to breathe. When her son, at age 5, saw her lying in a hospital bed, he said he had never before seen her lying down.
Doctors Innes and Drew said Wingate must be one of the longest survivors with heart valves.
For one thing, Drew said, she took medicine to keep blood from clogging. The valve consists of a titanium ball in a cage. When the blood is pumped forward, the ball goes to the front of the cage, so blood passes around it, though with the danger of clogging against the cage. After blood has been pumped past the ball, the ball recedes to block a hole between the halves of the heart and keep blood from reversing direction.
It was hoped this past February that Wingate could get a new heart, but her health suddenly turned for the worse and she suffered kidney failure.
Now she has dialysis three times a week, and her health is considered too poor for her to survive a heart transplant.
Her current cardiologist, Dr. Akrum Vaid, said her survival is measured now in months.
No matter what happens, Wingate's guts and faith gained her 26 years and a place in local medical history. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Doctors told Wingate in 1968 that her chances of surviving the
surgery were about 50-50.
Vivian Wingate helped demonstrate a heart-lung machine that pumped
and aerated her blood during the operation that replaced her heart's
damaged valves in 1968.
Color staff photo by Richard L. Dunston
Vivian Wingate, whose heart was damaged by rheumatic fever, had
double valve surgery 26 years ago.
by CNB