KEY POINTS:
Helen Harris faced losing decades off her life before she went under the scalpel of Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes in New Zealand's first open-heart surgery 50 years ago this month.
Mrs Harris, of Christchurch, was 9 when she travelled to Green Lane Hospital in Auckland for the ground-breaking operation to fix her heart.
She is making the trip again to attend a celebration today at Auckland City Hospital to mark the first half-century of open-heart surgery.
But while Mrs Harris was the first to have surgery using a heart-lung machine while her heart was stopped - on September 3, 1958 - she was also the seventh, two months later.
"The first operation wasn't successful and they had to do it again," she said. "I was in hospital for four months."
The operations were to close a hole between the chambers of her heart, a problem she was born with and which had caused breathlessness, lack of energy and restricted growth.
At the time children born with the condition, if they survived their first year, faced the constant risk of problems including heart failure. Few reached 40.
After the surgery, Mrs Harris (nee Arnold) made rapid progress.
"I improved out of sight when I came home. I grew and my weight increased. I was able to catch up with most things."
She had a further operation in1974 but has had ongoing heart trouble.
Paget Milsom, the clinical director of Auckland City Hospital's cardiothoracic surgical unit, said it had come a long way since the first open-heart surgery by Sir Brian, who died in 2006 aged 82. It was now estimated that more than 2500 open-heart surgeries were done in New Zealand each year.
"Sir Brian was one of the doyens of cardiac surgery, who pioneered techniques ... that made it possible to safely achieve the volume that takes place today," Mr Milsom said.
Among Sir Brian's innovations was his technique of implanting human-donor heart valves.
Starship children's hospital heart surgeon Kirsten Finucane said that when Green Lane began operations using the heart-lung bypass machine, it was one of only four or five hospitals in the world to offer the treatment.
In the 1950s, she said, it was a pioneering treatment for children with congenital heart abnormalities and only around 70 per cent of patients survived. But by the 1970s, this had increased to about 90 per cent.
"Through the 1990s and this decade the challenges have been in doing more corrections, more cures, in smaller and smaller infants."
