Binghamton's first open-heart surgery was in 1989, but acceptance wasn't easy at first

As I sit contemplating writing this column, I am also having thoughts of my own future passing through my brain.

No, I am not leaving or changing careers, unless there is something that you know that I do not.

No, in a few weeks I will be having some surgery to replace a very painful and not functioning left knee (and the right is not happy as well). Forty years of up and down on a concrete floor in the public library did a number on both knees in terms of arthritis and damage.

Now the time has arrived to become another one of my high school classmates to have yet another joint replaced. Don’t worry, I will write enough columns ahead so that it should appear seamless to the readers.

At our last class reunion, a great comment was made that all the men now have the same pear-shaped bodies and we compared how many joints had been replaced. What, to me, was more amazing was how almost commonplace those replacements had become and how well they functioned.

It also made me realize that this type of surgery has also become commonplace in our own area (over 3,000 surgeries each year), with little thought as to how advancing this technology has become. Even more amazing is the thought that in 1989, this county’s hospital system had the first open-heart surgery performed. That was 32 years ago, and it was a long road to becoming a reality.

The proposal to create an open-heart surgery unit was made in 1981 by the United Health Services unit. Robert Packer Hospital, in Sayre, Pennsylvania, was the closest facility performing that type of surgery at the time, and the over 40-minute drive for patients to that facility was seen as one of the key rationales for creating a new surgery unit in this part of upstate New York.

While it appeared to be a real need in the region, there was not acceptance by some of the population, including the editorial board of the newspaper, which raised its objection.

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In 1987, the newspaper reversed its earlier decision, as movement to begin this type of medical care was once again proposed. The development toward performing open-heart surgery was moving toward becoming a reality. Amazing what a difference few years made, as there was now acceptance that there was a real need and that the skillsets need to perform this type of surgery had been realized in the surgeons of the area.

In 1989, the first open-heart surgery was performed at Binghamton General Hospital on patient George J. Glover, a 66-year-old man who had suffered a recent heart attack. Glover was considered a good candidate, as the attack had not damaged the heart. The surgery was a success, and in the next few months, hundred of such surgeries were performed. Those surgeries continue to this day, and we sometimes accept them without realizing the amazing skills and technology that come into play.

In my own family, my father suffered a heart attack while undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. While awaiting surgery to put in a stent, the surgeon walked in 15 minutes later to tell me he could not do the procedure, as it would have killed my father.

Instead, the next morning, my father underwent successful quadruple bypass surgery while in his 80s. The surgeon told me he had just operated on a woman in her 90s, and it seemed commonplace. It was anything but, watching my father in the hospital bed with innumerable tubes coming out of him, and knowing that the surgeon had taken my father’s heart in his hands to replace four of my father’s arteries.

It is an amazing feat, and one that this region should be proud of — that the medical staffs of our facilities continue to perform operations to replace broken bones, broken limbs and broken hearts.

It took a number of years to get to that point, and I wonder how history will look back at the advancements made from 1981 to today and where they will be in another 30 years. Only time will tell. Now about that knee replacement.

Gerald Smith is a former Broome County historian. Email him at historysmiths@stny.rr.com.

This article originally appeared on Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin: Binghamton's first open-heart surgery in 1989 overcame resistance