/pats Azai and resists temptation to pinch her butt again / Good job. ^_^ What kind of exams were that exactly?
@Newp:
The surgery is on May 28th, so exactly 4 weeks from today. :-)
@Azai:
I remembered you asked about it one time, so today I remembered to ask Su's doctor about some details about the machine, which keeps Su's heart transplant alive. He said he can't disclose too many details about it, since that would basically be like revealing a company secret, but he told me the general way how it works at least. I'm not sure I understood the entirety of it, but that device basically acts as a sort of artificial body for the heart to work in. He said the heart is a very special organ, which isn't necessarily dependent on input from the brain and nervous system to stay alive. Apparently, all a heart really needs to keep beating is some blood it can pump around and take the nutrients it needs and oxygen from. So what that machine does is basically acting like a tiny, artifical body. The heart it contains inside is being kept in a special liquid, which keeps the heart oxygenated and nutritioned. Instead of blood, it keeps pumping around that liquid while the device keeps everything at body temperature and keeps stimulating the heart to not stop beating by administering little electric shocks in regular intervals. Each day, that liquid inside the container is being at least partly renewed and the data the device documents about the heart's performance and health is analysed. Apparently, keeping an organ alive like that for so long is only possible with a heart, since all other organs are too dependent on input from other organs and someone has yet to find out how to "fake" that input with a machine. That's what he told me.
