How great can maternal love be?
In 1984, an American mother, in order to save her child, endured questions from all mankind and made a decision that violated human morality.
The mother named "Teresa" in the United States decided to transplant the heart of the baboon to her daughter in order to prolong the life of her newborn daughter.
Condemnation poured in, but the mother didn't care, she just wanted her daughter to live.
So, what is the end result?
Teresa and daughter Faye
Bad news has come
Thirty-eight years ago, on a silent night, accompanied by a faint cry, a lovely baby girl fell to the ground in a hospital in California, USA.
Although Teresa, who was a mother at this time, was exhausted, after seeing her daughter, she felt that everything was worth it, and named her daughter "Faye".
At this time, the family was immersed in the joy of welcoming a new life, and no one thought that there would be a shocking news waiting for them next.
After a detailed examination of the newborn, the doctor found that Little Fii had "congenital left-sided hypoplasia syndrome."
As the name suggests, this is a congenital heart deformity, which means that the baby's heart is not developing well, and the disease can be said to be menacing, causing the child to die in the days or even hours after birth.
Teresa and daughter Faye
When Teresa, a new mother, heard the news, her mood was like a roller coaster, and she fell from the initial joy to the bottomless abyss.
Unwilling to believe that bad luck had befallen her daughter, Teresa repeatedly confirmed to the doctor whether it was a diagnostic error, but the doctor clearly told Teresa that there was nothing wrong with the results of the ultrasound.
What broke Teresa the most was not only the sudden bad news, but also the message from the doctors that existing medical conditions could not treat congenital heart hypoplasia.
Successive blows caused Teresa, who had just given birth, to fall into a mood of despair.
Theresa, who had no choice but to pin her hopes on the doctor, begging the doctor to save her daughter.
In desperation, the doctor can only say that maybe the larger hospital will have a way.
This seems to give the collapsed Teresa a glimmer of hope, in order to save the child's life, Teresa disregarded her newly delivered body and immediately decided to transfer to Loma Linda University Hospital.
The doctors of the hospital immediately consulted after learning of Little Fay's rare condition, although the participants in this consultation were all hospital experts and leaders in cardiac surgery, but after several rounds of discussion, there was still no feasible solution.
Although in theory, congenital underdevelopment of the heart only needs to be changed, the actual risk of heart transplantation is very large, not to mention that it is a newborn baby.
Even if these conditions can be overcome, a suitable heart donor will not be found for a while. The hardest part was that there were no successful cases of infant heart transplantation at that time.
After being re-denied by the authoritative doctors of the big hospital, Teresa seems to understand her daughter's future fate. However, he could not accept that his daughter who was pregnant in October was born shortly after she was born, and she was taken away by the god of death.
All the joy of welcoming life was overshadowed, and there was no way but Teresa to let her daughter take her home, wanting to spend more time with her children in the last time.
It may be that God was also touched by Teresa's persistent maternal love, so that things took a new turn, although everything is unknown, but this is undoubtedly the last straw for the desperate Teresa, so she desperately wants to grasp it.
A few days after Teresa returned home, she suddenly received a call from Loma Linda Medical Center, where a man claiming to be Dr. Leonard Bailey's assistant told her, "Maybe there's another way to get little Faye."
So what is the solution? Who is Dr. Leonard Bailey? Why would he dare to say that there might be a glimmer of life in this approach?
A turning point in life
Dr. Leonard Bailey grew up in the hospital with his nurse mother and was influenced by his mother and his mother's colleagues, so he aspired to become a doctor who saved lives and treated people.
Leonard Bailey has also been working in this direction, and the results have lived up to expectations. At the age of 25, he received his Ph.D. from the Loma Linda School of Medicine and quickly grew into an excellent specialist in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery.
During the few years of working in the hospital, Dr. Leonard Bailey saw that many children died of congenital heart disease, but all of them could not do anything about it, which made him very heartbroken and troubled.
So Dr. Leonard Bailey decided to study the method of congenital left heart hypoplasia, and effective cardiac repair surgery was not possible at the time, and it seemed that only the path of heart replacement could work. At the same time, he also knows that the fundamental problem of heart transplant surgery is not the transplant technology itself, but the search for a suitable heart donor.
First, there are fewer donors to heart donors themselves, and even fewer to match the indicators. Moreover, the heart is no better than the organ, and the heart transplant means: the beginning of a life and the end of a life.
The end of life is unknown, but those who wait for a heart donor simply can't afford to spend that time.
So Dr. Leonard Bailey turned his gaze from humans to animals, and since human hearts are hard to come by, he tried to find this possibility in animals.
In 1976, Dr. Leonard Bailey returned to Loma Linda Hospital to work on xenotransplantation.
Over the years, Dr. Leonard Bailey has conducted hundreds of transplant experiments on animals to prove the possibility of xenotransplantation.
When he learned of Faye's case, Dr. Leonard Bailey was both excited and nervous, excited that this was a very suitable research opportunity, and if the operation was successful, it would not only give Faye Jr. a new life, but also mean that his experiment was successful - which would save thousands of patients with congenital left-heart hypoplasia like Faye.
Teresa came to the hospital with joy, and after listening to Dr. Leonard Bailey's plan to "transplant the heart of a baboon to his daughter", she once thought that this treatment plan was very incredible, thinking that this doctor was a complete lunatic.
So he rejected this ridiculous offer at the moment, partly because it was unethical to replace the animal's heart in a human body; on the other hand, because xenotransplantation was a precedent that had never been set before, and he had to make his own daughter a guinea pig.
For a moment Teresa could not accept it, not only her, but also any ordinary person could not accept it.
But Dr. Leonard Bailey didn't give up, he kept explaining his original intentions to Teresa, and also told her about his years of work experience, hoping that Teresa would agree to his plan.
Teresa was very adamant at first, but when she turned her head to see her daughter's purple face and the faint breathing that she could not perceive, she knew that her daughter's time was running out.
At this time, there are two little people in Teresa's heart arguing, one says: "If there is no surgery, the daughter will only have one way to die", the other says: "If the operation is performed, the daughter has half the chance of surviving", and finally, the daughter-in-love Teresa agreed to Dr. Leonard Bailey's plan and was willing to let her daughter do the xenotransplantation of the "guinea pig".
Teresa knew that this decision was crazy and incredible, even ordinary people generally could not understand. But as a mother, she couldn't bear to do nothing but watch her daughter leave. So Teresa would rather take a risk and fight death, even if it is one in ten thousand.
One needed the subject of the experiment, one needed the daughter to survive, and both sides took what they needed, and a consensus was quickly reached. Dr. Leonard Bailey, who had Teresa's approval, was thrilled and immediately informed her of his surgical plan and potential risks.
There is no turning back to the bow, and Teresa agrees that after the operation, Teresa can only put her daughter's life in the hands of Dr. Leonard Bailey and give her daughter a chance to live.
Since you want to use the heart of the baboon for the transplant, then you must choose the most suitable. After a heavy screening, Dr. Leonard Bailey selected six female baboon cubs and performed rigorous tests and tests on various indicators to ensure that the heart donor was foolproof.
After everything was prepared, little Faye, who was only 12 days old, lay on the operating table and underwent an unprecedented operation in order to survive.
The procedure was performed by Dr. Leonard Bailey, MD, at the University of Loma Linda Medical Center.
The operation lasted for more than ten hours, although it was not particularly long, but for little Faye's family, it was as if it had been a century, and it was an unprecedented ordeal.
The situation in the operating room is not much better than outside, and there are all kinds of fears inside. Because when Dr. Leonard Bailey cut open Little Faye's chest and prepared to remove her heart, Little Faye's body temperature quickly plummeted to twenty degrees Celsius, which made everyone present shocked and inhaled a cool breath, but only Dr. Leonard Bailey did not hurry and methodically performed the heart removal operation.
After experiencing the abnormal body temperature of Little Fei, the people present were even more energetic, and did not dare to have any relaxation, for fear of a little accident. Fortunately, the follow-up went very smoothly. After removing Little Faye's heart, Dr. Leonard Bailey hurried to another operating room to retrieve the baboon's heart.
The baboon cub's heart was about the same size as the baby's, and after removing it, Leonard Bailey hurried to put the beating heart into a container filled with salt water.
The next thing is to implant the baboon's heart into little Faye's chest cavity, and everything is going on without any danger. Dr. Leonard Bailey was so engrossed that he never faked his hand the whole time, and even the final stitching of the wound was done himself.
The moment Dr. Leonard Bailey put down the scissors, the spirits of everyone in the operating room tensed up again, and they stared at the detector with bated breath, their hearts beating like drums, praying that a miracle would happen.
In the quiet operating room, the rhythmic sound of "drip, drip, drip, drip" is particularly loud and pleasant, which means that the vital signs of little Faye gradually return to normal, and the heart begins to beat regularly again.
At that moment, everyone's eyes were wet and hot, not only excited by the miracle, but also touched by the children's tenacious will to survive, and cheered for this unique new life.
Dr. Leonard Bailey walked out of the operating room, surrounded by Little Faye's family in an instant, she took off her mask and said to everyone: "The operation was a success!" ”
Dr. Leonard Bailey also told Teresa, Little Faye's mother, "The baboon's heart is already working properly in Faye's body." ”
Hearing this news, Teresa burst into tears of joy. For a while, the emotions could not be expressed, and only by crying loudly could they express their excitement.
At the moment when she learned that her daughter had been born, the heart that had been hanging for 12 days finally relaxed, and the mother's eyes were rekindled with hope and light.
But will things go the way everyone expected?
Heartbreaking results
Faye Jr. was sent to the special care unit of Loma Linda Medical Center for 24/7 monitoring immediately after the operation, partly because although Fay Jr.'s surgery was successful, it did not pass the dangerous period; on the other hand, because if the operation was really successful, it would be epoch-making for human progress, so each body data after Faye Jr.'s surgery should be recorded in detail.
After the transplant surgery, the most important thing is not to produce a rejection reaction, and if it is rejected, it means that the previous efforts are abandoned.
Little Faye spent two weeks in the ward, and everyone thought that everything was going in a good direction. The same is true of Teresa, who stays outside the ward every day, watching her daughter grow up, getting better and better every day, and is extremely glad of her original choice.
Even after the matter was made public, Teresa did not care at all when it was questioned and insulted by many people. She accepted the public's accusations and incomprehensions of her. Because in her heart, nothing is more important than her daughter's life.
Later, Little Fiyi recovered better and better, not only the wound was gradually healing, but even the current local infection did not appear. Not only that, little Fei slowly became lively, especially fond of laughter, "cute" to take care of her medical staff and all the kind strangers who paid attention to her, everyone prayed for this strong little guy.
But what caught everyone off guard was that this miracle was only a flash in the pan and did not last forever, and a few weeks later, Little Faye suffered a sharp failure of heart function, and the heart muscle function was very badly damaged.
Dr. Leonard Bailey's desperate efforts to rescue her were still unable to pull Little Faye back from the ghost gate, and one night her heart stopped beating. In the end, Death took the two-month-old Little Faye away.
epilogue
Teresa could not accept this hope and then despair, but to no avail.
The day after Little Faye's death, Dr. Leonard Bailey held a press conference to brief everyone on the results. Once again, the parties involved in the xenotransplant were pushed to the cusp of the storm, some accusing Dr. Bailey, some accusing the mother Teresa of killing animals, disregarding humanity, acting against humans, and so on.
For social doubts, all parties choose to be silent. Because for the mother Teresa, the daughter is the most important; for the academic community, their research on xenotransplantation has not stopped. Whether xenotransplantation can successfully extend human life is unknown, and the only thing we can do is grasp the present, cherish life, and live well.