HOUSTON New England Patriots Hoodie , April 16 (Xinhua) -- The look in the eyes of a 19-year-old Italian boy has never slipped heart surgeon O.H. "Bud" Frazier's mind throughout the decades.
Fifty years ago, Frazier, then a medical student in his 20s, was with a team operating on the boy with an enlarged heart at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. His heart stopped after the surgery and Frazier immediately started massaging the heart with his hand. At one point, the boy opened his eyes and saw Frazier. He reached out to touch Frazier. But massaging wasn't enough to keep him alive.
"I could never forget how that boy woke up, looked at me and touched me Custom New England Patriots Jersey ," said Frazier, MD, chief of Transplant Services at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, professor of surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, and chief of the Center for Cardiac Support at the Texas Heart Institute at Baylor St. Luke's in Houston's Texas Medical Center.
"I kept thinking if I could keep that boy alive with my hands even for a brief moment, we should be able to have a mechanical device such as a pump that would do the same thing," said Frazier New England Patriots Vapor Untouchable Jerseys , 77.
That experience planted a seed for a lifelong mission Frazier would embark on after his return in 1970 from his two-year deployment in Vietnam where he had served in the U.S. Army as a flight surgeon. Frazier has since been spearheading the effort at the Texas Heart Institute to develop heart pumps.
"With the technology we've developed, a patient like the Italian boy wouldn't t die today," Frazier said.
After four decades of labor of love by Frazier and his team, the heart pump, also called a ventricular assist device (VAD), has been globally adopted by heart surgeons as a standard therapy for patients with a failing heart. Over the past decade, an estimated 30 New England Patriots Color Rush Jerseys ,000 VADs have been implanted in patients around the world. These electromechanical pumps, also known as mechanical circulatory support devices, augment or replace the function of the patient's own heart to circulate blood throughout the body. Baylor St. Luke's is one of about 160 hospitals in the U.S. that have performed heart pump implantations.
A surgical pioneer in heart transplants, Frazier has also been globally recognized as the leader in the development of left ventricular assist devices (LVAD), the most widely used heart pumps in the world. Additionally he is noted for his pivotal role in the development of total artificial hearts.
"Dr. Frazier is the world's foremost expert on LVADs who invented and popularized these devices," said heart surgeon Jeffrey A. Morgan, MD Patriots Cyrus Jones Jersey , chief of Cardiothoracic Transplant and Circulatory Support division at Baylor College of Medicine and the Texas Heart Institute.
Frazier was a protégé of the late, world-renowned heart surgeons Drs. Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley, who were responsible for Houston's decades of fame as the mecca of heart science.
In addition to the impact of his encounter with the Italian patient, Frazier recalled how he felt pumped by U.S. President John F. Kennedy's announcement of the goal of the space race during his speech on Sept. 22, 1962 at Rice University in Houston.
"This city of Houston, this state of Texas, and this country of the United States were not built by those who waited and rested Patriots Martellus Bennett Jersey ," Kennedy told the crowd. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Frazier said, "I was inspired as a medical student. We were a Kennedy generation