Free The Heart Healers by James Forrester

had failed just hours before. Fail this time, and it was all over. At Episcopal Hospital, twenty-four-year-old housewife Constance Warner awaited him. Let’s pause for a moment to salute the courage of this young woman, who epitomizes the bravery that we will so often behold in the patients in our narrative. Her chance of survival was remote. But even if she were the first to survive, who could say if she would feel more or less fatigued, more or less short of breath? When Constance Warner underwent anesthesia at age twenty-four, she had to imagine she would never wake up.
    Bailey opened her atrium. Perhaps the solution to the dilemma of opening a scarred mitral valve lay in the combination of the device and the finger. He would use the device for crude separation, the finger for finer dissection. He slipped a curved blade over the end of his index finger, and inserted it into her atrium. He moved his finger over the scarred valve. There it was … the point at which the two leaflets had fused. The scar was too tough to separate with his finger, but if he could use the blade … Bailey used his curved blade to cut through the toughest scar on valve leaflets. Now he had a small groove that separated the fused leaflets. He withdrew his finger and slipped the blade off the tip of his finger. He reinserted his index finger. There was his groove. Now he could use his sense of touch to pry apart the remaining scar. By touch, at least, it seemed like an excellent separation. He withdrew his gloved finger. He closed the hole in her atrium. As he closed the incision in her chest, Bailey looked down at his sleeping patient and allowed himself just a ray of hope. This time, surely his last chance, every part of his surgery had gone well. When he finished, Charles Bailey harbored the hope, however forlorn, that he was discarding far more than his operating gown and mask.
    Constance Warner’s recovery was different from the very start. She returned to her bed with stable vital signs. By the third post-op day Constance got out of bed. She walked to the bathroom, then the halls. Her breathing, her energy, her sense of well-being already was vastly improved.
    As Constance walked the ward, Bailey plotted his vindication. It lay a half continent and a week away, and it was pure Charles Bailey. At the end of the week, he convinced Constance to take a 1,000-mile train trip with him to Chicago. Before a packed auditorium at the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians, the most prestigious professional organization of his peers, Charles Bailey rose to introduce Constance Warner. His presentation electrified the attendees. Sensational world headlines followed. Back in Philadelphia, daggers were sheathed as Bailey’s critics fell silent. What had begun two weeks earlier as an outrageous duplicity had become an interesting footnote to a moment in history. Charles Bailey, the dirt-poor kid with the domineering mother, the commoner with unquenchable ambition, the avenging son, the curmudgeon battling pigheaded fools, the Chosen One, had seized the prize. Charles Bailey was cardiac surgery’s Neil Armstrong: vaulted forward by the work of others, yet venturing where no person had gone before, he stepped out onto the lunar landscape of cardiac surgery and planted his flag.
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    AND WHAT ABOUT Constance Warner? When reporters contacted her nine years later in her second-floor walk-up apartment, Constance had a second child and was taking full care of her children. A walk-up apartment had been beyond her imagination a decade earlier. Bailey never failed to stay in touch with Constance as she had two more children, became a grandmother, and lived a full life over the next thirty-eight years. She died at age sixty-two of severe respiratory complications following an episode of herpes simplex.
    In the years following his landmark achievement, Bailey continued to be successful. Yet only a man who suffered no fools would end