Inside Story was a part of the TV news program "Entertainment Tonight" from the 1980s and during this time was hosted by Mary Hart. This particular special featured the news on the death of Lucille Ball and highlighted her life and career. For more information on Lucille Ball, visit Everything Lucy at [ Ссылка ]

A two-part look at medically why Lucy died: On April 18, 1989, Lucy started experiencing severe chest pains in the morning. Gary rushed her to Cedars-Sinai where physicians performed tests and diagnosed an “aortic dissection”. In this condition, the wall of the aorta tears, allowing blood to flow into passages between 3 layers of the blood vessel’s walls. Eventually, her whole aorta was dissected from her heart into the abdomen. By 2pm Lucy was rushed into emergency surgery that lasted 6 ½ hours, where a 5-inch segment of the first part of the aorta was replaced with that from a donor. This was to prevent bleeding or a heart attack and give the walls time to heal. Given her age this was as long as they felt comfortable keeping her under and in the future could have gone in and made repairs. For the next week Lucy seemed to be progressing well, “she was sitting, eating, and even getting to walk a bit.”

On April 26, 1989, Lucy woke up in the early morning hours complaining of back pain and lost consciousness. Within minutes her heart stopped beating. The heart monitors and her private duty nurse recognized something catastrophic was happening. Physicians and nurses worked for 47 minutes trying to revive her but sadly Lucy was pronounced dead at 5:47am. “She basically had no more blood to pump around. Even if she had been in the operating room when it occurred, we would not have been able to save her.” Essentially what happened was that she had another rupture in a different area and this one blew like a frayed garden hose. There was no way they could have repaired or attached it.

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