Writing about historic implant was heartwarming experience

The night of Dec. 1, 1982, was made for flannel nighties, with a heavy snowstorm putting on a show that was too late for Thanksgiving and too early for Christmas. I put my nightie on, hoping for a good night's sleep before heading to the University of Utah early the next morning for the much-anticipated implant of an artificial heart in the chest of Seattle dentist Barney Clark.

About 9 p.m., a phone call from the U. medical center public relations department led to a swift swap of the flannel nightie for more conventional wear suitable for a wintry nighttime drive to the U.

Clark's tenuous grip on life was quickly fading and the surgery had been hastened to intercede before it was too late. The protocol approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the procedure required a patient nearing death for whom no other alternatives remained.

As my little Ford Escort slithered and slid up 100 South toward the medical center, I came up behind a small blue pickup truck also struggling and trying to get a grip on the snow-covered street. When we both arrived in the medical center's parking lot, Dr. Chase N. Peterson, then-U. vice president for health sciences and official spokesman for the implant, exited the pickup and greeted me, and we walked into the hospital together.

In the weeks to come, Peterson was going to get a lesson in meeting the dozen diverse needs of the media, which were at that moment collecting in a corner of the hospital's cafeteria.

The avid newsgatherers ran the gamut, from Dr. Larry Altman, a physician/journalist and writer for the New York Times, who could ask the salient medical questions, to an eager National Enquirer scribe whose main concern was the color of Dr. Clark's pajamas. Most of us fell into the middle tier — workaday reporters who had spent varying amounts of time before the implant trying to learn what we could about the procedure so we could accurately pass information on to the public.

This was the event we'd been looking forward to for months. Since U. officials had announced that an implant was pending, the artificial heart had become the story that never quit.

It was a journalist's dream. Fascinating, colorful people at all levels of the team. A few "family squabbles" about whether or not the U. should be involved in such an undertaking. The ethical questions surrounding the removal of a beating heart and replacing it with a complex apparatus that would forever doom the recipients, at least the first of them, to a life limited by several hundred pounds of complex equipment.