At 71, former Vice President Dick Cheneywas older than average for a heart transplant, but doctors said on Sunday that advances in care have made it possible for older patients to still be good transplant candidates.
And not only was he older than the typical patient, but he waited longer than average as well -- 20 months vs six months to a year.
Doctors said Cheney must have been in excellent health to have survived five heart attacks and still been eligible for a heart transplant. Cheney is recovering at a Washington-area hospital after transplant surgery on Saturday.
"He's obviously received superb care," said Dr. James Kirklin, director of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a recent past president of the International Society of Heart & Lung Transplantation.
"He's an elderly man who likely has taken very, very good care of himself to be in this good shape at age 71. It appears that he has been relatively lucky to have avoided major organ problems that would have precluded a transplant," said Kirklin, who is not treating Cheney.
3 comments:
He is proof that money and position and not age will get you anything you want in the end. Under the new health care system he would have been denied because of age. I don't believe he would have received that heart if he weren't Dick Chaney!
My grandfather died of of a congestive heart and was diagnosed at 71, but since he only had medicare, there was nothing available for him, but he did live on for ten more years.
5:26 You are incorrect. Cheney waited his turn. Unlike Steve Jobs who unable to get a liver transplant in his home state of California fast enough to suit him ( despite having terminal pancreatic cancer) manuevered his way onto the transplant list in Tennessee. He received a liver that a native Tennessean should have gotten. But thats okay, isn't it, as long as it is a progressive liberal Democrat working the system and getting over on the rest of us its celebrated. Dick Cheney is a hundred times more of a patriotic honest American that Steve Jobs.
You're kidding me, right Anon 8:25?
Dick Cheney and honest in the same sentence?
Is that why he's called Darth Vader!?
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