Chapter 2546: Trimming

Remove the right atrium of the recipient, leaving only the left atrium, and keep everything else unchanged. This avoids the issue of having two sinus nodes while saving time in the most troublesome left atrium pulmonary vein anastomosis.

Doctor Ye Chuanguang quickly discerned that they might be planning to adopt the bicaval method or the Whole Heart Method for the surgery because if the biatrial method was being used, there would be no special instruction to preserve enough vena cava length for the subsequent donor-recipient heart anastomosis.

Specifically, whether such a nine-year-old child will challenge the most difficult Whole Heart Method probably needs to wait until the donor heart is delivered to the Shou’er operating room and placed in the child’s thoracic cavity to assess the situation.

Finally, knowing what surgical method they might plan to use, Doctor Ye Chuanguang told them, "I will try to trim it as carefully as possible for you to facilitate your operation, after all, the journey is quite long."

The hospital on the other side willingly offered to help, for which Xie Wanying and the teachers at Shou’er were certainly extremely grateful.

Speaking of the donor heart being removed from the donor’s body, the surgical doctor needs to do preliminary trimming. Previously, if there were no special requests from the Shou’er side, the surgical doctor would handle it themselves and would not specifically preserve the vena cava length of the right atrium.

Knowing that they might need the bicaval method or Whole Heart anastomosis method, Ye Chuanguang, also a cardiac surgeon and experienced in heart transplant surgery, clearly understood that the left atrium’s bilateral pulmonary vein group anastomosis sites are the most challenging to address. As the heart retrieval surgeon, he could help his colleagues by tidily trimming this area in advance: removing all the tissue between the left upper and lower pulmonary vein groups and the right upper and lower pulmonary vein groups of the left atrial posterior wall, turning them into two large cuffs, reducing the suturing steps from four to two at the anastomosis site of the recipient.

In this way, the coordinating matters were basically concluded, and after verifying that other conditions were correct, they were only waiting for Doctor Duan to fly with Student Pan to the Zhongshan Medical First Affiliated Hospital to retrieve the donor heart.

Rough estimates indicate that flying back and forth would take several hours, so there was no rush to push the child into the operating room. Before that, Xie Wanying and Student Wei could first visit Zhu Xing in the PICU.

Zhu Xing looked at his older brother and sister and asked, "When will my younger sister come back?"

Having stayed in the PICU for a while, this little boy surprisingly developed the awareness of being an older brother. Instead of worrying about himself, he was first concerned about the condition of the young girl in the next bed.

Regarding Xiaohui’s surgery, Xie Wanying and Student Wei remembered hearing the other doctors mention in the office: the donor heart Xiaohui needed was not far from the Capital. Dr. Han would ride the hospital ambulance to the destination hospital and return, which was expected to take four hours. No wonder Xiaohui was pushed into the operating room early for preparation.

According to this schedule, Xiaohui should now be anesthetized and preparing for chest opening. The actual start time of the chest opening surgery should await Dr. Han confirming the acquisition of the donor heart at the donor hospital.

The surgery must not start too early, as an excessively long operation time is harmful to the child patient. More crucially, there might be variables when retrieving the donor heart. For instance, if Dr. Han discovers that this donor heart does not match the previous report and is unsuitable for his patient upon arrival, he can only refuse it. Although the probability of this variable is low, no one can say for certain before acquiring the organ.

Later you’ll find out, as Student Xie experienced with the liver transplant last time, that the size of the donor heart is not the most worrying thing in organ transplantation.

After little Zhu Xing fell asleep, Xie Wanying and Wei Shangquan exited the PICU.