Bruce Nutter's heart, as he so bluntly puts it, was "going kaput" about three months ago.

The 71-year-old retiree from the Glenn County town of Orland, who had a five-way bypass surgery in 1991, was considered the highest of high-risk patients. His heart was pumping at 20 percent of its maximum capacity – less than 10 percent is fatal.

Cracking open his chest for invasive surgery to clear two severely blocked blood vessels did not look promising, said his cardiologist, Dr. David K. Roberts, medical director at the Sutter Heart & Vascular Institute in Sacramento. But the timing of Nutter's heart failure turned out to be fortunate.

Sutter had just been selected as one of 50 hospitals nationwide to participate in a clinical trial for a new, noninvasive heart pump, the Impella.

Snaked into the heart's left ventricle through the groin, the Impella is a less-invasive catheter about the size of a soda straw that uses a screw-shaped blade spinning 30,000 revolutions a minute to pump 2.5 liters of blood through the chamber during procedures.

"Essentially," Roberts says, "it's an artificial heart using a catheter. It pumps blood independently from the heart while you do what needs to be fixed."

Before having the Impella at his disposal, Roberts would have operated on Nutter using an aortic balloon pump, which sits outside the heart and requires a functioning, beating heart to help keep him alive. Also, the Impella can pump a larger volume of blood – 2.5 liters per minute, five times that of the balloon.

So, in April, Nutter became the first patient west of the Mississippi River to undergo an Impella procedure.

"Using the balloon pump, which I've done for 15 years, I never would've tried to treat both bypass grafts at the same time," Roberts says. "There's a risk of sending debris down and creating complications. We would've had to bring him back a couple months later to treat the other (vessel)."

Instead, in less than three hours, Nutter was off the table and back in his room resting, with both vessels cleared and his heart functioning on its own.

"He was so stable during the procedure," Roberts says. "The device just took over. I saw him in the office a couple of weeks ago and his heart had improved significantly. Two months out, his heart is back to normal function."

A month after Nutter's surgery, the Impella – made by Abiomed Inc. of Danvers, Mass. – received FDA approval. A company spokesman says Abiomed will start selling the device, which costs $25,000, to 1,700 heart- specialty hospitals.

Roberts says Sutter was chosen for the trials because it has Northern California's only heart transplant program outside the Bay Area.

After operating on Nutter and a second patient during the trial phase, Roberts says, Sutter decided not to further use the Impella until the hospital's entire intensive care nursing staff could be properly trained.

By the end of this month, he says, training will be completed and Sutter will be using the device routinely for patients for whom open-heart surgery is deemed too risky.

An additional life-saving use is for patients whose blood pressure crashes and the heart gives out. The Impella, Roberts says, can resuscitate the patient until he or she is stabilized. It can stay in use continuously for as long as five days.

"If you send somebody immediately into surgery, the mortality is at least twice (that of patients admitted and prepped for surgery)," he says. "If you can stabilize them, it's less shock to the kidneys and the whole organ system, and they can get the procedure done two or three days later.

"There's no question it'll save lives. There have been at least two patients this year that come here in cardiogenic shock and died that, if I'd had this device, would've been saved."

Nutter, the Orland retiree, counts himself as lucky to be saved.

"I came out feeling pretty good," he says. "Maybe I've got a few good years left."

Call The Bee's Sam McManis, (916) 321-1145.