Doctor: 'Thrilled' for heart recipient

Dr. Robert Dowling

Robert Tools, 59, the first recipient of the first fully contained artificial heart, spoke at a news conference at Jewish Hospital, making his first public appearance since the July 2 operation.

Following his statement, CNN anchor Joie Chen spoke with Dr. Robert Dowling, one of Tool's doctors.

Chen: Tell us in your view how you think he is doing.

DR, ROBERT DOWLING, HEART RECIPIENT'S DOCTOR: We think he is doing wonderful. We have really been impressed with his progress. We have been impressed with his inner strength, his and ability to handle the stress of going through such a high-profile big surgery. So we are very pleased with his progress.

CHEN: Is he doing better than you might have anticipated? At some point people were talking about maybe this would just extend his life for a matter of weeks or months, but he seemed awfully strong.

DOWLING: Yes, he has gotten stronger. He has exceeded our expectations. He has done everything we have asked of him. The device has worked perfectly well. His organs have all recovered even beyond what we had hoped that they might. So he is ahead of the game and we are very happy about it.

CHEN: Dr. Dowling, we have questions for you now from the live Web chat audience.

"What problems has Mr. Tools had with his new hear?" That is from Elise Suelflow.

DOWLING: Good question. So far we have been blessed. The heart itself has functioned flawlessly. There has not been a single concern or period where an alarm went off or the heart even skipped a beat. So no problems at all with the heart itself.

CHEN: I'm wondering -- I suppose from your perspective it probably, a picture is worth 1000 words and seeing Mr. Tools on television certainly assured all of us how well he was doing. But I wonder if you as his doctors have wanted him to go public.

DOWLING: Have we wanted him to go public? No, we have left it totally up to him. Whenever he was comfortable with it. We didn't feel any sense of urgency for him to go public. We thought whenever he was ready it was fine with us.

CHEN: Here is another question, I need a quick answer on this. This question is from Susan Anderson, "Is there much danger for infection with this artificial heart?" That is the great concern, isn't it?

DOWLING: We always worry about infection with any surgery, especially when we put anything in, whether it is a pacemaker or an artificial heart. We take a lot of stops prevent infection. It is something we always think about, run a lot of antibiotics.

But we won't know what the infection rate with this device is until we do a lot more patients. We have looked at the immune function of our experimental implants and laboratory values and the device did not make the immune system weak, so we hope that the infection rate will be very low.

CHEN: Doctor, I have to ask you from my personal view, I have got the think that you, as a physician, standing there and realizing that when you put this device into him, I guess you also took his real heart out.

This must be still for you even, a very miraculous moment in medical history.

DOWLING: It was -- at times overwhelming, thrilling. I remember right after we did the surgery I was so proud of our team. I think the most emotion I had was, I was just thrilled for the patient. He was facing a certain death and he had the courage to take a chance. He knew it was experimental. He knew it might not work.

It has just been thrilling every day to go see him is a thrilling thing.

CHEN: It is something of a miracle, we have to say.

Dr. Robert Dowling is with Jewish Hospital. He one of Mr. Tools lawyers (sic). We will continue to watch and see how that progresses.