How Many Tries Would It Take You To Successfully Perform Open Heart Surgery?

In the short history of doing these voicemail blogs, this might be my favorite one we’ve had yet. A throwback type of question a la "would you put a baby in the microwave for three seconds?". Same irrational confidence with everyone in the room as well. Feits and Pavs thinking they could do this in under 100 attempts is just an insane take.

With that being said…I could definitely do this. The first 20 or so attempts are going to be null and void because I’m gonna puke the second we open this person up, which if I had to guess would cause some sort of gnarly infection. 

One thing I know for sure is I’ll have a big screen set up in the operating room playing a step by step guide of how to perform open heart surgery. Might be a little bit of a shock for the person on the operating table to see when they’re wheeled in, but that’s what the anesthesia is for.

I’ve done some light reading on the steps it takes to perform an open heart surgery in order to write this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it would probably take me 150 tries, +/- 10 tries. When you dumb it down there’s not that much you have to do. Our good friends over at the Cleveland Clinic list the steps here:

Source

1. Makes a 6- to 8-inch long incision (cut) down the middle of your chest.
2. Cuts your breastbone and spreads your ribcage apart to reach your heart.
3. Connects your heart to a heart-lung bypass machine if you’re having an on-pump surgery. An anesthesiologist gives you medication to stop your heart from beating and monitors you during your surgery.
4. Repairs your heart.
5. Restores blood flow to your heart. Usually, your heart starts beating on its own. Sometimes, the heart needs a mild electrical shock to restart it.
6. Disconnects the heart-lung bypass machine.
7. Closes your breastbone or other incision with wires or sutures that remain in your body.
8. Uses stitches to close your skin incision.

Steps 1-3 are probably going to take me 20-25 tries to really nail down. The breastbone and ribcage are both strong parts of the body, so they can take a bit of roughness. No finesse needs to be developed there. It might get hairy at step 3, but the caller did say you get a team of doctors, so as the lead surgeon I’ll call on them for that.

There’s no two ways about it…step 4 is gonna trip us up. BUT, the heart isn’t that big, so there’s only so many places you can snip at before you eventually get it right. We’ll tack on another 100 attempts to get that down. 

It sounds like step 5 will figure itself out, and step 6 seems like you’re simply unplugging an Xbox, so maybe that takes me 5 tries to figure out? 

Steps 7 and 8 it’s basically like we’re tying our shoes. Although, I’m still not sure I do that right myself, so that will probably take us 30 tries. That’s that, after 160 tries, we will have performed successful open heart surgery. My apologies to the previous 159 patients.

In all seriousness though, shoutout to all that do this every day without any flaws. One of the wildest, most impressive things we do as humans.

Full voicemail starts at 1:16:50

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