Dr. Michael DeBakey, 97, Saved by Operation he Developed

In late afternoon last Dec. 31, Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, then 97, was alone at home in Houston in his study preparing a lecture when a sharp pain ripped through his upper chest and between his shoulder blades, then moved into his neck.

Back at Work In 1965, Time magazine featured Dr. Michael E. DeBakey and his work in a cover story. Dr. George P. Noon, right, said some doctors were waiting for Dr. DeBakey to die during his heart operation or soon after. "But he just got better."
Dr. DeBakey, one of the most influential heart surgeons in history, assumed his heart would stop in a few seconds.

"It never occurred to me to call 911 or my physician," Dr. DeBakey said, adding: "As foolish as it may appear, you are, in a sense, a prisoner of the pain, which was intolerable. You're thinking, What could I do to relieve myself of it. If it becomes intense enough, you're perfectly willing to accept cardiac arrest as a possible way of getting rid of the pain."

But when his heart kept beating, Dr. DeBakey suspected that he was not having a heart attack. As he sat alone, he decided that a ballooning had probably weakened the aorta, the main artery leading from the heart, and that the inner lining of the artery had torn, known as a dissecting aortic aneurysm.

No one in the world was more qualified to make that diagnosis than Dr. DeBakey because, as a younger man, he devised the operation to repair such torn aortas, a condition virtually always fatal. The operation has been performed at least 10,000 times around the world and is among the most demanding for surgeons and patients.

Over the past 60 years, Dr. DeBakey has changed the way heart surgery is performed. He was one of the first to perform coronary bypass operations. He trained generations of surgeons at the Baylor College of Medicine; operated on more than 60,000 patients; and in 1996 was summoned to Moscow by Boris Yeltsin, then the president of Russia, to aid in his quintuple heart bypass operation.

Now Dr. DeBakey is making history in a different way ?- as a patient. He was released from Methodist Hospital in Houston in September and is back at work. At 98, he is the oldest survivor of his own operation, proving that a healthy man of his age could endure it.