It was 1959 when surgeons performed the first open heart surgery at St. Boniface Hospital.
A team of medical professionals took months to train and prepare before the risky but successful operation on a child.
“The surgeons knew what they were doing, the auxiliary staff had to practice what exactly what they were doing,” said perfusionist, Marcel Roy, who began working at the St. Boniface Hospital the following year in 1960.
“The job essentially is to provide circulation, heart, lung circulation while a person is undergoing open heart surgery.”
Now retired, Roy ran the heart-lung machine during surgeries. He said 55 years ago, everything was done by hand and was very time consuming.
“It took me an hour just to cut the tubing, it had to be washed. It would take me another hour to assemble it before we could send it downstairs to be sterilized,” said Roy. “Once sterilized, the plastic became very opaque, it had to be cleared again, but that took about 6 hours to clear in a heating cupboard. The first year I was here we did 42 cases; we could only do it about once a week.”
Though he didn’t assist during the surgery in 1959, Dr. Roy can guess as to how the room would have felt leading up to the operation.
“Quite tense,” he said. “There were a lot of people in the room, not really knowing what everyone was supposed to be doing, because you had so many different things and it was the first one.”
In the beginning, emergency cases needed to be booked about 2 weeks in advance.
“The first year I was here we did 42 cases, we could only do it about once a week,” he said.
“Today that case would be done as a fairly routine case in a pediatric cardiac surgical centre. In those days it was monumental, it was innovative, high, high risk case where the risks might be 50/50 in terms of survival,” said Dr. Alan Menkis, medical director of the WRHA’s cardiac sciences at St. Boniface Hospital. “Nowadays those risks would be in the two or three per cent, or less.”
The technology has rapidly evolved, but the techniques used are still similar.
“To some extent, nothing has changed and to another extent, everything has changed,” said Dr. Menkis.
Dr. Roy said technology and the materials they used changed dramatically two years after he started.
“Every year there was something new coming on the market, more refined, better techniques so it has changed quite a bit and I’m sure it’s still changing quite a bit,” he said. “When you open the heart, the heart has to stop and in order to keep the circulation going, you need the heart, lung machine.”
“There’s still a pump, there’s still an oxygenator, there’s still a retriever for the blood and there’s still a heater and cooler unit,” said Dr. Menkis.
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