To check the temperature of various parts of the heart, Love uses a measuring device on the end of a wire. The fastest way to warm up the body is to route blood from a vein into the heart-lung machine, and back to an artery. The aorta at the top center of this double-bypass operation is connected to two grafts. One graft supplies the anterior descending branch of the left coronary artery. The other supplies the right coronary artery.
Love adds ice to the chest.
The anesthesiologist checks Smith's pupils, and finds them small and of equal size. As they work, blood that leaks into the cavity around the heart is sucked into the heart-lung machine and returned to circulation. He watches the surgical fellow delicately sew the second graft to the circumflex artery. In fact, the whole operation is starting to look like a long advertisement for the kind of low-fat eating that can often prevent artery damage in the first place. The fat makes it hard for these two surgeons to locate the artery, and they momentarily resemble baffled medical students in their first anatomy class.