A brutal surgery, a Midwest romance

Dr. C. Walton Lillehei's pioneering, high-risk surgery in the 1950s brought us life-saving open-heart surgery. Lillehei himself underwent a radical operation at the hands of his mentor, Dr. Owen Wangensteen, to save him from deadly cancer. Walt's wife, Kaye, nursed him back to health. It was the latest chapter in a romance that began before Walt left to operate a MASH unit in World War II.

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An excerpt from 

Chapter Three: Invasive Procedures

After reading what he could find about the treatment of lym­phosarcoma, Lillehei reluctantly agreed to surgery. Trying to stay focused on his work until the very last minute, he was awake into the early hours of the day of his operation com­pleting the final draft of an article about ulcers that he'd coauthored with Wangensteen. Before finally going to bed, Lille­hei asked his wife, Kaye, to type it.

At 7:15 A.M. on Thursday, June 1, Lillehei entered Univer­sity Hospital's Room I, Wangensteen's room. He did not know exactly what would be done to him while he was asleep. He knew only that Wangensteen intended to open him up and remove everything that might conceivably be cancerous.

David State, the surgeon who'd removed Lillehei's parotid tumor in February, began the operation.

Under Wangensteen's supervision, State excised the re­mainder of Lillehei's parotid gland. Then senior surgeon Varco scrubbed in and he and State started on Lillehei's neck, from which they took all of the lymph nodes and glands. Some of the nodes near the jugular vein were enlarged, and Wangen­steen decided they had to go down into the chest. Wangen­steen had not raised this possibility to his patient, but it was too late now to seek permission: Lillehei was dead to the world, his face and neck splayed open like an anatomy-class cadaver.

Now Wangensteen scrubbed in. Four hours had passed; for 1950, it was already a marathon.

Assisted by yet another surgeon, John Lewis, Lillehei's best friend, Wangensteen split the sternum and opened the chest. Wangensteen carved deep, removing more lymph nodes, more glands, muscle, fat, vessels, the thymus, an entire rib. No op­eration like this had ever been done anywhere. This was scorched earth, and the bleeding was horrendous. Lillehei was transfused, pint after pint after pint of blood—including one donated by Norman E. Shumway, an intern who many years later would invent human heart transplantation.

Ten hours and thirty-five minutes after the operation started, Wangensteen was finally done.

Seven surgeons, four anesthesiologists, and several nurses had assisted.

Nine pints of blood had been used.

Twenty-three specimens had been sent to the pathologist.

Lillehei faced twelve sessions of radiation. Still, he was alive.

The odds said that in five years, he would not be.

¨¨¨¨

A week after Wangensteen's lymphosarcoma surgery, Lillehei was discharged to the care of his wife. They lived with their young daughter in a duplex apartment near the university.

The only daughter of Swedish immigrants, Katherine Ruth Lindberg grew up in Minneapolis. She was an uncommonly pretty girl, who was voted Most Popular by her high school classmates—and who had her choice of boys. "If you had lis­tened closely, you would have heard my knees rattle," one of her high school suitors confided in a note he slipped to Kaye after watching her play volleyball, one of several sports at which she excelled. "You were the cutest one on the floor—thanks for the privilege of looking at you. I think you are per­fectly proportioned. . . . What is your locker number?"

Kaye Lindbergh Lillehei, 1938.

After graduating at the top of her class, Kaye entered the University of Minnesota's nursing school, intending to be­come a stewardess and then a practicing nurse, perhaps even a supervisor or administrator. Kaye met Walt in 1941, at Min­neapolis General Hospital, where she was studying and Walt was serving his internship.

Wow—look at that blond! a friend of Kaye's said to her one day when Dr. Lillehei walked onto the ward.

Kaye agreed that Walt was a looker. And she admired the way he, unlike so many of the interns, always took the time to listen to patients and offer them encouraging words. For his part, Walt thought Kaye had the best legs of any of the stu­dent nurses.

Kaye was dating someone else, but when he left for the navy, Walt asked her to a hospital picnic. They went steady from that day until Lillehei enlisted in the army, in June of 1942. Before leaving, Walt gave Kaye his fraternity pin; when the war was over, they would marry. For more than three years, as Lillehei moved with the Allies across northern Africa and into Italy, the couple exchanged letters constantly—and planned to reunite overseas even as war raged.

"My darling Kaye, Sweetheart," wrote Walt in one of his letters, "I'm so damn much in love with you I'm in misery. . . . You are so darn cute and lovely darling that you undoubtedly will get many invitations for dates, but please wait for me faithfully my dear because I am sure that we will be together very soon."

But Kaye never did get overseas during the war. And three and a half years apart took a toll: although Kaye and Walt re­mained engaged after Walt came home, they did not rush to the altar. Wangensteen's demanding residency program ab­sorbed Walt, and Kaye was flying for Northwest Airlines. "We were two different people," Kaye recalled later. "We just sort of went on different paths."

An abrupt change in airline policy pushed Kaye and Walt to wed. Desiring only unmarried stewardesses, Northwest in late 1946 declared that starting in 1947, married women would no longer be hired; the only married stewardesses would be those already married and on the payroll by that January 1. Figuring it was now or never, Kaye married Walt on New Year's Eve—beating the deadline by mere hours. Eighteen months later, the Lilleheis had their first child, a girl they named Kim.

¨¨¨¨

Never before gloomy, Lillehei went into a funk the summer of 1950. His chest wound became painfully infected, and Varco came by evenings to clean it out (for his troubles, Lillehei mixed them both martinis). Another complication, a dilated stomach, sent Lillehei staggering to the emergency room. Two weeks of radiation treatment for his face left him nauseated and raised the specter of worse side effects some day, including cataracts. That, of course, was assuming Lillehei lived.

This was no easy time for Kaye, either. Doctors had just sent her mother to a sanatorium for tuberculosis, and with the care of her sick husband, now Kaye had to abandon her work toward a master's degree in nursing, which she had been pur­suing at the University of Minnesota. Her stewardess days were already history; abruptly reversing its marital-status pol­icy, Northwest Airlines had sent the newlywed a pink slip shortly after she'd returned from her honeymoon.

That terrible summer, Walt tried to move his mind off things by watching TV, mostly afternoon baseball games and a few programs that were broadcast before midnight, when stations signed off until morning. He read medical journals, worked some on his doctoral dissertation, and looked ahead to autumn, when he hoped to resume operating and open his own lab.

Physical suffering was only a part of that summer's misery. Although he never mentioned it to Wangensteen, Lillehei re­sented the chief's cutting so deep, without forewarning—es­pecially considering the pathologist's final report, which showed no further malignancy anywhere. Nonetheless, Wan­gensteen had recommended a second-look operation in six months. Lillehei refused. Enough was enough.

And Lillehei worried for his young family. Wangensteen continued to pay his salary, but no insurer would cover a lym­phosarcoma survivor. With savings from the wartime pay he had dutifully sent home, Lillehei began to invest in the stock market. This, too, would turn out to be fortuitous in ways the young doctor could never have imagined.