Geraldine and Dan Thompson and their children

Geraldine Thompson probably did not understand what she was doing that day in early 1958 when her husband, Dan, escorted her into a federal courtoom in Minneapolis. Walking unsteadily, her left arm stiff and crooked by her side, Thompson took the witness stand. A medical-malpractice lawyer began to ask her a few simple questions.

What is your name? the lawyer said.

Thompson knew it. She also knew her age, which was 33.

Very good, the lawyer said. Now what about your children?

Her oldest, Thompson said, was 12.

In fact, Leslie Ann Thompson was 11.

Her next child, Thompson said, was ``about 10.'' In fact, he was nine. Asked her third child's age, Thompson said: ``Oh, let me see — seven or eight.'' He was eight. And the Thompson's last child? She was six, but all Thompson could come up with was ``the baby.''

Five minutes after she'd taken the stand, Geraldine Thompson was excused. The jury needed no further proof that she was not normal.

But she had been, witnesses testified — a vivacious young woman who had golfed, danced, and managed a family of six, including a heart-crippled daughter, Leslie. Everything had changed on Oct. 5, 1954, in Walt Lillehei's University Hospital operating room. Thompson had been about to serve as the donor — the life support — for her daughter during the cross-circulation repair of Leslie's VSD, or ventricular septal defect. But somehow, an ``air bubble,'' as the newspapers later called it, got into Thompson's bloodstream. Air — deadly to tissue; air — not quite enough to kill this time but enough to irreversibly damage Thompson's brain.

Lillehei had not been responsible. He hadn't even seen it happen; his back had been to Thompson and the doctors who were readying her to be a donor. He was opening Leslie's chest, but he never finished the operation. Thompson's blood pressure plunged, and although she was revived, she was in no shape to support someone else's life. Leslie's chest was closed, her heart left unrepaired.

In the weeks that followed, as it became clear that Thompson would never be the same, Lillehei had a confidential talk with her husband.

Dan, you have to sue us, Lillehei said. You can't say I told you that, but the money you're going to need to take care of Geraldine for the rest of her life is so great that you won't be able to handle it on your own. You have to sue.

Lillehei was right. Dan Thompson was in the Air Force. He was not a wealthy man.

Thompson got a lawyer and filed a $550,000 suit, against Lillehei, two other University Hospital surgeons, and three hospital anesthesiologists. The hospital offered to settle. It would pay $35,000, and Lillehei would try again with Leslie — by now, they were using Richard DeWall's machine, which oxygenated without requiring a donor. Thompson's lawyer wanted $50,000. Dan agonized, but finally refused to settle. The case went to trial. Leslie stayed unhealed.

Now, for the first time, Lillehei got to experience how publicity could cut both ways. Reporters covered every minute of the trial, two stories a day, in the morning and evening papers. It was so sad, reading Thompson's memory of his wife's words when she emerged from her coma: ``Where am I? What happened to me?'' It was pathetic, learning that sometimes now she thought she was in China or Bermuda, or that spiders and little men were loose in her bed, or that it was still 1954, not four years later. It was a tragedy, a woman who'd once weighed 110 pounds and now weighed less than 80 — a golfer and dancer who today had difficulty dressing herself.

In his turn on the stand, Walt Lillehei, instructed by lawyers, volunteered nothing. He answered only questions he was asked: No, he hadn't seen air get into Geraldine's bloodstream, allegedly through an IV bottle that ran dry; no, monitoring IVs wasn't the surgeons' job but the anesthesiologists'. And, no, he hadn't been aware of any problem at all until his concentration on Leslie was broken by an ``unusual commotion'' at the table where her mother lay.

After almost 25 hours of deliberation, the jury rendered a mistrial; six months later, a federal judge dismissed the case. The Thompsons got no money. They didn't even get the full truth.

The full truth was this: An anesthesiologist overseeing the operating rooms had dropped in as Lillehei's surgeons were tapping into Geraldine Thompson's bloodstream. He saw an empty IV bottle, all right — but thought it was full, just not flowing. This wasn't so crazy: IV solutions were transparent. Thinking the tube must be plugged, the anesthesiologist gave a few squeezes on the bulb — and air, not glucose, was launched toward Thompson's brain. The anesthesiologist never publicly confessed. He wouldn't even have told his bewildered colleagues if they had not, through the process of elimination, determined what had happened.

Lillehei continued his work at University Hospital. The Thompsons returned to Texas. Leslie finally had her open-heart operation, in 1960, in Maryland; she survived the surgery, but died a few days later. Geraldine Thompson's care became too much for a man on a military salary and, reluctantly, he placed her in a mental hospital. She would believe in her own truth: that her husband had been kidnapped by agents of some enemy government. She would remain stuck in 1954, in the Cold War.

Geraldine Thompson's brain was crippled, but her heart was strong. Forty-one years after the trial, she would still be alive, a reminder more vivid than a stone on a grave that the road to Lourdes was marked with tears.

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