This is neither the first nor the last time the team must manipulate air or blood pressure during the operation. The mind jumps briefly to a group of overpaid plumbers, then realize that a man's life is on the line. Men, incidentally, receive 73 percent of bypasses, and they tend to survive them better. Two possible reasons for this are that women have much smaller blood vessels, and because men get heart disease when they're younger, meaning they tend to be in better condition for surgery. Love specializes in the rare lung transplant operation, but kept his hands busy last year performing 150 heart bypass operations.
Love assesses the progress.
Smith had kidney surgery years ago and is on medications that decrease his resistance to infection. He has high blood pressure, and his arteries are calcified , making them harder to sew, Love explains, and easier to tear. Love explains that Smith would be a high risk for most hospitals, but UW is a teaching hospital, and it gets cases nobody else wants to touch. For a teaching hospital, he's an average risk. Waiting for a heart attack is not necessarily a good idea.