BT Shunt surgery: the movie

We learned something fascinating this week: James just had the same procedure that pioneered the field of heart surgery, and has its own place in Hollywood fame.  The BT shunt, formally the Blalock-Taussig shunt, was actually invented by a doctor-assistant duo in a true story along the vein of "Good Will Hunting". Vivien Thomas was a black man in the age of segregation and was never educated beyond high school. He worked as a janitor in Doctor Blalock's lab, where he showed an aptitude for medicine and surgery despite having zero training. Blalock, Thomas, and Taussig eventually invented and performed a previously unthinkable heart surgery.  Moreover, their inspiration was a fellow "blue baby", afflicted with a slightly different condition (tetralogy of Fallot) although with similar symptoms as James. This true story was made into a movie with none other than Severus Snape (aka Alan Rickman) and Mos Def.

In fact, we learned a second interesting thing as well: James was diagnosed with DORV but may in fact be in some ways more like DOLV. Although his dominant ventricle is physically on the right side, it actually performs more like a morphological left ventricle. This is good news for James, since he really can only use the one ventricle: the human body's left ventricle is more suited to the sort of heavy lifting needed to pump blood throughout the body; whereas the right ventricle is really designed for the smooth, steady pumping of blood on the short trip to the lungs. Essentially, this means that having DORV wears the R part of the heart out quicker because it has to overstrain itself at every pump getting blood to the body, while DOLV will take some of the strain off. Thus his chances of long-term success with the heart surgeries are a little better and overall he'll have a slightly lower chance of heart failure. Ahh, the human body.