From KSDK News, May 2, 2005

A Mount Vernon, Illinois, man is making local medical history with a new heart device.

It''s called "Tandem Heart," a pump that acts like a portable heart-lung machine. The device has never been used before in our area, and is reserved for heart patients who are so sick they wouldn''t survive surgery.

Doctors at Barnes-Jewish Hospital implanted the device for the first time last week in a 75-year-old man with severe heart blockage.

"I never had no idea that I had any blockage at all, not one bit," says Henry Kaufman, the first Tandem Heart patient.

But Henry Kaufman''s condition was so critical that doctors at Barnes-Jewish Hospital knew he wouldn''t survive an operation to open the blocked artery and place a stent.

"These are the most critically ill patients," explains Dr. John Lasala, director of interventional cardiology at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

Dr. John Lasala and his colleagues decided to use the Tandem Heart in Kaufman because it can be put in without an operation, meaning it can be used in the sickest of the sick. Tubes carry the blood to a pump that assumes about 85 percent of the heart''s pumping function. It''s used just long enough to put stents in arteries or get a patient healthy enough for a heart transplant.

The pump that drives the device is worn on the leg.

Kaufman had a Tandem Heart for just three days. "I feel real good," he said, three days after having it removed.

That was just enough time to place a stent and allow his heart to recover.

"In this particular case we did see that the pumping function of the heart improved after two or three days," says Dr. Lasala.

Doctors say the Tandem Heart is designed to support patients for short periods of time: no longer than about three weeks.

Kaufman was released from the hospital Friday, and is back at home and doing well.