Man has open-heart surgery by roadside

First Edition

A DOCTOR performed open-heart surgery by the roadside on a man who had been buried alive in a trench yesterday.

Charles Deakin, 29, decided to operate when other revival techniques failed. He said the man's heart had stopped beating and he had turned blue when he arrived at the scene.

The man was buried when the side of the trench he was working in at Northolt, west London, collapsed. His workmates tried to dig him out with a JCB but he was eventually freed by firefighters.

Dr Deakin said: 'We had already tried giving electric shocks and that hadn't worked, so it was then I decided I had to open him up and cut a slit in his lungs to let air out because they had collapsed.

'I used a scalpel and a saw to cut him open between his ribs, right from one side to the other.

'This left us with an opening of about three feet to inject him with a lot of drugs directly into the heart and to massage his heart with the hands. I injected drugs into him, and squeezed his heart between my fingers to keep it going.'

The man, who is in his thirties, has not been named. He was last night in a 'poorly' condition at the London Hospital in Whitechapel.