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Show MIRACLE SURGERY Doctors End Long Torture SAN FRANCISCO-An unprecedented unprece-dented operation which rostore1 the ability of a 43-year-old man "to j swallow has been reported by three University of California surgeons. A gunshot wound caused the f. flictior. of the unnamed patient. He had to take all food and liquid j through a tube that by-passed ni ' throat Any attempt to swallow caused coughing and strangling, j He could not appear in public. After three years of this torture. 1 the man was on the verge of suicide, the surgeons said in a medicai publication. The Annals of Surgery. Bullet Cut Nerves The doctors, Howard C. Naff- riger, H. Glenn Bell, and Cooper Davis, found the bullet had cut , four important face and head nerves. The nerves could not be restored. The surgeons decided I to try to cross-connect some of the ' healthy muscles of the throat to replace those made useless by nerve degeneration. Medical books did not show the surgeons all they needed to know about swallowing. Slow-motion Slow-motion X-ray movies of normal swallowing and the patient's attempts to swallow showed for the first time, they said, the mechanism of the procedure. Before operating on the patient the doctors experimented on three monkeys. One of the things about the patient pa-tient was that some of the useless use-less muscles in his neck bulged out when he tried to swallow, obstructing the throat passage. The doctors bound these muscles mus-cles with a strip of thick, tough sheathing tissue which normally covers the main bundles of blood vessels and nerves in the neck. The other main difficulty was that the patient's Adams apple would not rise. This is one of the important movements in swal- lowing. j Surgeons Split Muscle The surgeons made a lengthwise length-wise split in a muscle which runs 1 from the back of the head to the 1 base of the tongue and the chin. This muscle normally retracts the ; tongue. Part of the muscle was j left for the tongue. The other! part was tied to the Adam's ; apple, restoring its ability to rise 1 The patient was afraid to try his rebuilt throat at first, but now is swallowing normally, the , doctors said. The new operation may help , some war wounded. |