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A British man is preparing to leave the hospital after pioneering surgery to install an artificial heart implant. The implant is powered by a portable device and is designed to keep him alive while he waits for a heart transplant.
It looks like a casual family stroll.
But Matthew Green is a walking miracle.
His heart has been removed.
Green is kept alive by a device called a Total Artificial Heart powered by a magnetic charger kept in his shoulder bag.
The 40-year-old was suffering from end-stage biventricular heart failure. Neither side of his heart worked as it should.
Doctors at Cambridge's Papworth Hospital feared he'd die while waiting for a donor heart to become available for transplant, and decided an artificial heart was his best option.
Surgeons led by Dr Steven Tsui operated on him in June.
[Dr. Steven Tsui, Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon and Director]:
"We removed the patient's diseased native heart, including both of the failed ventricles, as well as all the heart valves. And then we put in the new machine and the insertion is stitching the machine in, in a way very similar to a heart transplant. The operation itself went very smoothly. It took us about six hours to do the operation."
Mechanical hearts have been transplanted before, but have usually only replaced parts of the organ.
The device works by replacing both failing ventricles and the heart valves they contain.
[Dr. Steven Tsui, Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon and Director]:
"These two tubings are called the drive lines and these are tunneled across the skin, so that they can be attached to an external console....Once the patients have made recovery from the surgery itself we then change to a smaller portable console."
