Heart patient salutes his legendary surgeon

By FRANCESCA MOLD and MARTIN JOHNSTON

Bob Ritchie was only 13 when he was forced to choose between certain death or a radically new operation to mend a hole in his heart.

It was 1960 and the Auckland teenager had been told he had about six years to live unless the hole the size of a 20c piece could be closed.

His survival hinged on an operation first done in New Zealand just two years earlier by legendary cardiac surgeon Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes.

Forty years after that operation, Bob Ritchie is grateful he put his trust in Sir Brian and joined the growing number of New Zealanders to undergo the life-saving surgery.

The Torbay man, now 53, has led a very healthy life although he had a slight problem with his heart two years ago when he had a pacemaker fitted after suffering from blackouts.

He remembers not being afraid of having the operation in 1960 because it offered him the chance to lead a normal life.

Mr Ritchie was born with the hole between the ventricles in his heart.

As a child he had suffered from excessive sweating and breathlessness, tired easily and was never allowed to play sport.

A year after the surgery, he was playing rugby and cricket - something he had always dreamed of doing.

Sir Brian, now 76 and retired, said he was not surprised Mr Ritchie had led such a healthy life in the past 40 years as the surgery was considered "more or less curative."

He said holes in the heart were a common congenital deformity which, if left untreated, could cause the heart to become enlarged and go into failure.

The first hole-in-the-heart operations were performed in 1955 at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and Minneapolis, where Sir Brian worked at the time.

The operation involved taking over the circulation by using a heart-lung machine, which pumped blood to the brain but did not flood the heart and obstruct the surgeon's view.

"It [the machine] means we can work inside an empty heart then we close the hole over with a patch which can be a woven cloth or the patient's own tissue or, if the hole is amenable, by direct stitching without any material."