Tag Archives: infection

Introduction Professor Stephen Westaby Many of us have watched severe heart failure patients die miserably during haemorrhagic pulmonary oedema. The first for me was my 60-year-old grandfather when I was seven years old. Not something that was easily forgotten. Months later, in 1955, I watched the first episode of ‘Your life in their hands’ from the Hammersmith Hospital. They talked of open heart surgery using something called cardiopulmonary bypass. It was then, in the backstreets of a northern steel town, that I decided to be a heart surgeon. Figure 1. Skull pedestal power delivery Fifty years later, when the BBC resurrected the series,

Over the years they have been white, green, pink, lilac and even a rather unpleasant shade of yellowy-brown, reminiscent of vomit. I refer, of course, not to the various shades of automobiles I have gone through since my first car (a Morris Minor, circa 1972 – a dark green, D reg, ‘jelly-mould’ as they were affectionately referred to), but to the myriad of coloured theatre and catheter lab attire donned by yours truly over nearly four decades of invasive medical procedures. The first question must be, why? What is the rationale behind such clothing needing to be of any particular tint? I guess it starts with having to discriminate our d

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