Since she was an eight-year-old schoolgirl in Manhattan, Helen had known that something was seriously wrong with her heart. Doctors had told her to take it easy; there was nothing much they could do about it then. Her trouble was that the by-pass between the aorta and the main artery to the lungs failed to close some time after birth. The open by-pass is vital to the fetus (fetal blood does not get oxygen from the lungs before birth), but it is harmful in later life because it puts an extra strain on the heart.
Last January, Helen, 22, married Robert Zimmerman,...
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