Schroeder's joviality and fast recovery astound his doctors
The metal-and-plastic heart whirred and clicked in an eerie, mechanical rhythm as Dr. William DeVries, 40, removed the tracheal tube from his patient's throat. For the first time since his artificial heart had been implanted about 36 hours earlier, William Schroeder, 52, could breathe on his own and speak. "Can I get you something to drink?" the doctor asked. Replied Schroeder: "I'd like a beer." It was, DeVries admitted afterward, one of the high points of the tension-filled hours following his second successful attempt to implant an artificial heart.
Schroeder had to settle for a glass of ice chips, but that did not dampen his spirits. Later he demanded to know the time. "Six o'clock," replied DeVries. Schroeder looked skeptically at the lanky surgeon who had saved his life, pointed to a clock on the wall and wagged a finger. Wrong, he said. The clock showed that it was only five minutes before the hour.
No question about it, less than two days after undergoing two arduous operations, Bill Schroeder, a retired Government quality-control inspector from Jasper, Ind., was as sharp as a tack and feeling frisky.
By week's end the world's second recipient of an artificial heart was getting out of bed and sitting in a chair, eating solid foods—warm porridge and cottage cheese—and sipping that longed-for beer, which he promptly dubbed "the Coors cure." Well-wishers had sent cases of the Colorado brew and other brands, in addition to crateloads of cards, plants and bouquets, even a Cabbage Patch doll.
On Friday Schroeder tested a new portable power system for the artificial heart. For 22 minutes in the afternoon, and an hour later that evening, he was free of the 323-lb., air-driven unit that normally runs the heart, and was hooked up to a small, 11-Ib. device encased in a leather shoulder bag. The portable system worked flawlessly though there were two breathless 3-sec. intervals when the heart stopped beating, as technicians switched from one system to the other. Afterward, Schroeder thanked the inventor of the device, Engineer Peter Heimes of Aachen, West Germany, and shook his hand. Then he asked for some ice cream.
Doctors at Louisville's Humana Hospital Audubon were astounded by Schroeder's rapid progress and by his good humor, which, noted Dr. Allan Lansing, medical director of the hospital's heart institute, "is more important in his recovery than most medicines."
Even when he was wincing in pain as attendants tried to weigh him, Schroeder managed to get off a ones-liner. "I'm going to remember this," she griped at the staff. "I want the name of everybody in this room, starting with the big guy," he said, I pointing at the 6-ft., 5-in. DeVries. In the view of Schroeder's wife of 32 years, Margaret, her husband appeared to be "more comfortable" last week "than he had been for months before the implant." She told a news conference, "Once we went down toward that operating room, I was relieved because I felt that my husband was fading away from me, and now I feel I have him back again and that I have another chance."