Together they devised an operation to save “Blue Babies”— infants born with a heart defect that sends blood past their lungs— and Cooley was there, as an intern, for the first one. Blalock had prepared for just such an operation in more than a decade of experiments on dogs at Vanderbilt Medical School in Nashville. The operation was successful, although the baby died a few months later. In 1944 Blalock, with Thomas by his side, performed the first "blue baby" operation on Eileen Saxo, a 15-month-old baby. Three years later, Blalock and Dr. Helen Taussig earned international acclaim for their "blue baby" operation on a 14-month-old girl, while Thomas' … By the time the first shunt was attempted on her, she was in danger of dying. Eileen herself could not have waited any longer. The operation was successful, although the baby died a few months later. Tetralogy of Fallot, also known as blue baby syndrome, is a complex four-part heart anomaly, thought to be untreatable until then. In the winter of 1947, Elizabeth Davis had already sold 10 of her cows and was considering the sale of her entire farm to finance a second life-saving operation for her eight-year-old daughter. The new surgery, still experimental, was used only on children with no other hope for survival. Eileen had a heart condition that starved her body of oxygen. Eileen Saxon, the first Blue Baby, died from complications within a year after her operation. Eileen was a “blue baby.” About 2,000 blue babies are born each year. Tiny and weak, she weighed just 9 pounds. Blalock now started working on it along with Taussig and Thomas, performing the first surgery on November 29, 1944 on a fifteenth month old child named Eileen Saxon. it was the first successful surgery on the human heart of the modern medical era. The blue baby operation. However, within weeks she became cyanotic again. Eight-year-old Carol Lee Davis was Dr. Conklin’s first "blue baby" patient. He remembers the tension in the operating room that November morning in 1944 as Dr. Blalock rebuilt a little girl’s tiny, twisted heart. The operation she was about to undergo would be the first attempt to treat her congenital heart condition, which was called the tetralogy of Fallot or blue baby syndrome. In fact, he had devised a "blue baby syndrome" in dogs. The team consisted of surgeon Alfred Blalock (1899-1964), pediatric cardiologist Helen B. Taussig (1898-1986), and surgical technician Vivien T. Thomas (1910-1985). Blalock and Thomas attempted another operation, which Eileen did not survive. Known as the ”Blue Baby operation,” the procedure was first performed on a tiny, 18-month-old girl suffering from tetralogy of Fallot (blue baby syndrome), a combination of heart defects that kept her blood so starved for oxygen that she appeared blue. The 2004 movie produced by HBO, Something The Lord Made, is a dramatic documentary based on the Saxon baby operation. 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