Now I’ve seen everything.
I admit, I’m not the greatest Twitter user but for this, I’d definitely tune in. A hospital in Houston last Tuesday morning “livetweeted a beating heart double bypass operation on a 57-year-old male patient on its official Twitter account, @houstonhospital,” according to a story by Taylor Hatmaker at Tecca as posted at news.yahoo.com.
The Memorial Hermann Medical Center team even set up a hashtag, #mhopenheart, to invite those watching to tweet questions to a cardiologist during the procedure, and for those not too squeamish to watch, even offered a video feed (over a helmet cam) to tune in live, according to the story.
The surgery, performed by cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon Dr. Michael P. Macris, took only two hours, according to Hatmaker, just short enough to hook Twitter users, and it included a combination of live surgical updates ("’Pericardium is being opened and retracted...stand by,” Hatmaker writes). Twitpic photos, and cardiac facts were also part of the tweets, as were repeated warnings about the graphic nature of the tweets, she reports.
CBS News in Houston reported that the hospital’s collected data stats showed the live Twitter event was screened by over 4 million people, and the streaming video, 38,000 views, according to a story by Candice Leigh Helfand.
An estimated one in three -- or a whopping 82 million-plus -- people has cardiovascular (CVD) disease in the U.S., according to the Journal of the American Heart Association and it accounted for a third of all deaths in America in 2007, the last year for which there are statistics. The journal also reported that 2,200 Americans die of CVD disease every day, or a rate of 39 a minute, somewhere in this country. CVD kills more people than cancer and accidents annually, the journal additionally pointed out.
Heart bypass surgery remains one of the best options for treating those with certain forms of CVD,
Edited by
Rich Steeves
