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Friday, March 14, 2003Celebrity Medical Watch: Pregnancy and motherhood in all their gory details, made all the gorier in the context of the D'Angelo and Pacino breakup: "I'm absolutely heartbroken and devastated that my children have been abandoned by their father," D'Angelo told the New York Post. Pacino, 62, wanted children, and the 49-year-old actress went through a life-threatening pregnancy, swelled to 215 pounds and almost lost one of the babies after giving birth. Even before the breakup, D'Angelo says, Pacino was an indifferent father. He's never changed a diaper, according to one friend, and will deal with D'Angelo only through a lawyer or his psychiatrist. His psychiatrist? Meanwhile, in the real world, Christopher Reeve savors the small pleasures the rest of us take for granted thanks to an experimental procedure that allows him to breathe without a respirator for brief moments: After the electrodes were implanted in his diaphragm and the respirator was turned off, "all you could hear was me breathing through my nose - regular rhythmic breathing from my nose for the first time in nearly eight years," Reeve said Thursday. ....The actor also has his sense of smell when the respirator is off. During one of those sessions, his medical team brought coffee, oranges and other test objects into his room. "I actually woke up and smelled the coffee," he said. Reeve is hearing his own breath and smelling oranges thanks to an electrodes placed on his diaphragm: The operation, called diaphragm pacing via laparoscopy, involves threading tiny wires through small incisions in the diaphragm. The wires connect the electrodes to a control box worn outside the body. The control box sends a signal to the electrodes 12 times a minute, causing the diaphragm to contract and air to be sucked into the lungs. When the nerve is unstimulated, the diaphragm relaxes and the air is expelled. That Christopher Reeve, he’s a living medical tour de force. posted by Sydney on 3/14/2003 07:48:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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