Scanvalve
I met my heart surgeon for the first time this morning, he is a softly spoken Indian gentleman with a wonderful manner. He has quite a calming presence, and I am very glad that he will be the person performing my heart surgery.
He describes the heart surgery in detail and it’s pretty much as I expected. He’s going to crack my ribs so that he can open up my chest, tie off my lungs and heart arteries and veins, connect me to the heart lung bypass machine, stop my heart, cut a couple of holes into my heart so that he can get in and look at my mitral valve, and then decide what to do. He won’t know what sort of procedure he will perform on my heart until he can look at it anatomically, but once he does he will do one of two things to fix the mitral valve, which currently doesn’t close properly:
1) if it is only one leaflet of the mitral valve damaged (there are six leaflets that close together to form the mitral valve), he will cut off the faulty bit, put a ring around the valve to make it smaller so that the leaflets overlap and closes properly, start my heart to make sure it works ok, if it doesn’t work stop it again and fix it, when it’s all working ok stitch me up and send me home within a week. No long term medications, and the repair should last forever. This is the preferred option.
2) If more than one leaflet is damaged, he will perform a complete replacement of the mitral valve with a metal valve. The metal valve is coated with Teflon so that it’s a non-stick surface, sort of like the surface of a Scanpan frying pan. Funnily enough, my Scanpan is one of my favourite possessions in the world – but having a Scanpan heart is kinda taking my devotion a bit far!! This procedure will involve me having to take warfarin (an anti-clotting medication) for the rest of my life which will be a bit annoying, but I’m more concerned about the more practical implications of the Scanvalve – I’ll set off metal detectors in airports around the world, which is a problem for a jetsetter such as myself!
The alternative to the Scanvalve is a pigvalve (a mitral valve from a pig), but funnily enough they don’t last as long as a metal valve, so given my age and life expectancy the Scanvalve is the only option. The way this is going, I’m soon going to be Bionic-Rog!!
He describes the heart surgery in detail and it’s pretty much as I expected. He’s going to crack my ribs so that he can open up my chest, tie off my lungs and heart arteries and veins, connect me to the heart lung bypass machine, stop my heart, cut a couple of holes into my heart so that he can get in and look at my mitral valve, and then decide what to do. He won’t know what sort of procedure he will perform on my heart until he can look at it anatomically, but once he does he will do one of two things to fix the mitral valve, which currently doesn’t close properly:
1) if it is only one leaflet of the mitral valve damaged (there are six leaflets that close together to form the mitral valve), he will cut off the faulty bit, put a ring around the valve to make it smaller so that the leaflets overlap and closes properly, start my heart to make sure it works ok, if it doesn’t work stop it again and fix it, when it’s all working ok stitch me up and send me home within a week. No long term medications, and the repair should last forever. This is the preferred option.
2) If more than one leaflet is damaged, he will perform a complete replacement of the mitral valve with a metal valve. The metal valve is coated with Teflon so that it’s a non-stick surface, sort of like the surface of a Scanpan frying pan. Funnily enough, my Scanpan is one of my favourite possessions in the world – but having a Scanpan heart is kinda taking my devotion a bit far!! This procedure will involve me having to take warfarin (an anti-clotting medication) for the rest of my life which will be a bit annoying, but I’m more concerned about the more practical implications of the Scanvalve – I’ll set off metal detectors in airports around the world, which is a problem for a jetsetter such as myself!
The alternative to the Scanvalve is a pigvalve (a mitral valve from a pig), but funnily enough they don’t last as long as a metal valve, so given my age and life expectancy the Scanvalve is the only option. The way this is going, I’m soon going to be Bionic-Rog!!
posted by Rog at 10/26/2006 03:29:00 PM
1 Comments:
We will pray for option one.
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