37 years ago, on July 21, 1988, the first transplanted heart in Latin America began beating at the General Hospital of La Raza, in Mexico City, thanks to a team of specialists led by the cardiologist Rubén Argüero Sánchez, who reported on Monday the circumstances of that historical day.
A pioneer intervention that did not have authorization and that “was illegal”, but that “had to be done”, explained Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Medicine from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Rubén Argüero, 90.
That Thursday of 1988, after operating a friend’s sister, the cardiologist talked with a neurosurgeon who told him that he would carry out a complicated intervention, in which it was possible for the patient not to overcome it.
Therefore, Argüero asked him that, if the patient died for some reason, he warned him, which happened two hours later. “There is the donor,” the doctor thought, that although he did not have the full authorization of the hospital, he had the support of the administration personnel.
At that time, the search for the candidate for heart transplantation began and the chosen one was José Fernando Tafolla Chávez.
The man was reading the newspaper and, after communicating that he was chosen, the doctor asked him if “we played it”, to which Tafolla replied: “Doctor, that is clear, the only one who plays her here is me.”
In the number nine operating room of the Hospital de la Raza, the extraction of the donor’s heart was carried out and, in the next room, the operating room ten, after more than five hours of operation, was evidenced “an incredible silence in a room that was full.”
The new heart was not beating.
After “the longest 18 minutes of my life,” said Argüero, in which the already implanted heart did not work, the mechanical stimulation occurred to him.
“Because when in cardiac surgery the heart does not start, doing everything very well and washing and warming it, sometimes with a tap contracts, and said and done, I gave a soft clamp and started the first beat and then another and returned, then I gave him three others and continued in front and said ‘We already won.’ So it was the beginning,” said the specialist.
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Say goodbye to the heart and a step for medicine in Mexico
At 23:03 at night, the heart began to beat and nine days later Tafolla Chávez left the hospital, although he did not want to abandon his extracted heart.
Thanks to the help of a psychiatrist, who was part of the team, they discovered that the transplanted patient did not want to leave “because he had not fired his heart.”
Therefore, after seeing it through a jar and crying, “he said goodbye to his heart” and the next day he said: “At the time you want to discharge myself, doctor.”
The operation was the starting point for Mexico to start the transplants of other organs.
“It was the start, 500 years ago that he took his heart and offered it to the gods, now a heart is taken to give someone a second chance,” said the cardiologist.
Now, 37 years later Argüero explained that “we do not think of any law” and that, although the result would have been another, it would have done it again despite the warning of the then Secretary of Health, Dr. Jesús Kumate, who days before the intervention made a blunt warning.
“If it goes wrong, the patient will be three meters underground. And Dr. Argüero, probably, is three meters behind a fence,” was the warning of the secretary who, fortunately, was not fulfilled.
With EFE information.
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