Michael Stravato for The New York Times
PIONEER AND PATIENT Dr. Michael E. DeBakey during a 2006 interview in Houston.
Posted on 05/01/2007 11:21:02 PM PDT by neverdem
It was the fall of 1996, and Boris N. Yeltsin was running for re-election as Russia’s first president in the post-Soviet era. But he faced a crisis far more threatening than any opponent: he was desperately ill.
Mr. Yeltsin had had a heart attack. He was experiencing chest pain from angina. He needed a coronary bypass operation. But his Russian doctors said he could not survive such surgery.
For independent advice, Mr. Yeltsin reached out to an American doctor as renowned in Russia as he was in the United States: Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, the pioneering Houston heart surgeon.
Dr. DeBakey agreed to go to Moscow, and after examining Mr. Yeltsin he determined that the Russian leader could indeed survive a bypass operation. It was not widely noted in the obituaries for Mr. Yeltsin, who died last week at 76, but that consultation very likely saved his presidency, if not his life.
In doing so, it changed the course of history. Among other things, if Mr. Yeltsin had not been re-elected, he would never have had the opportunity to reach deep into the Russian bureaucracy to select Vladimir V. Putin, then an obscure functionary, as his successor.
“All the doctors agreed Yeltsin would have died if he did not have the bypass,” Dr. DeBakey said in...
--snip--
Mr. Yeltsin’s medical team followed Dr. DeBakey’s advice to correct the thyroid and other problems to prepare him for the bypass operation. A key monitor of heart function is the ejection fraction, a test that measures the proportion of blood ejected from the main chamber of the heart in each beat. After the medical tuneup, Mr. Yeltsin’s ejection fraction rose significantly, to 40 from the high 20s. After the operation, the fraction improved to 50, good but still a bit less than normal.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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