Surgery

(Surgery Consultation << Previous Page

10/16/2008
It is the day before surgery. Before Dr. Glower can proceed, Dr. Wang must perform a cardiac catheter to verify the health of my heart's coronary arteries, and to further verify that the valve function was as expected.

After sitting in the wating room for 5 hours, I am finally wheeled into the procedure room. There is a large camera placed over my chest. The doctor hooks up an IV to my arm, and then and injects some local anesthetic around my femoral artery. This is where they will insert the catheter. After a few minutes, the catheter is inserted. I can see the catheter enter the heart by looking at a monitor nearby. They then injected the radioactive into the catheter. Within moments, I could feel my whole body getting very hot. They warned me that this would happen and that it was normal. At that moment, I could also see the dye fill up the left ventricle- showing the function of the mitral valve. They also injected the dye into my coronary arteries, which then displayed very clearly on the monitor with the dye coursing through them.

After the procedure, they deemed my heart to be as predicted and that the coronary arteries were in perfect condition - negating the need to do a fully invasive open heart surgery (sternotomy or breastbone cracking). They could now proceed with the minimally invasive repair as planned.

The next day (10/17/2008), the scheduled day of surgery, I arrived early in the morning. I went to a waiting room and was given a pager. After a few hours, the pager went off, and I was escorted to a dressing area, where I put on the gown and departed from my family until after the surgery. I was then wheeled into a room, just outside of the operating room and given several IV's one of which had a (welcomed) sedative administered through it. I don't remember much after that - only waking up in the ICU with a breating tube down my throat.

In ICU after the surgery, the only thing I could think of other than (being thankful to have survived the surgery), and (did Dr. Glower repair, rather than replace the valve?), was when I could get this tube out of my throat. Both my wife and my brother were there, as expected, but the only thing I could do is stare blankly at them.

It seemed like 30 minutes or so later, that someone finally removed the throat tube. I was able to talk immediately. Dr. Glower was there at that point. I asked him how the surgery went and he said excellent - that he was able to repair the valve with almost no leakage. Well, that was great news!

Dr. Glower took "before and after" pictures of my valve, which were shown to me in ICU. Below are those pictures.

Mitral Valve Before Surgery

After Surgery

Apparently, my valve was almost twice the size as normal, but was still repairable with apparently neglible leakage. The first picture (above), shows the valve prior to surgery. I don't know what it is supposed to look like, but it doesn't look anything like a valve that would work property. Both the anterior and posterior leaflets look like a jumbled mess. The lower picture shows the post-repair state of the valve. You can clearly see the annular ring put in place to resize and support the valve structure. The reconstructed anterior leaflet is clearly visible, where the posterior leaflet is visible to the right and bottom left.

The next few hours in ICU were pretty rough. There were three drainage tubes in my chest that were very painful. Everytime I contracted my chest or stomach muscles it was exponentially worse. For some reason, the pain medication that they put into the IV reacted with the anesthesia and made me very nauseous. This was a difficult trade-off, since any contraction of the chest or stomach was excrutiatingly painful.

After that ordeal, I was finally wheeled to a "step-down" unit, which was the private room that became "home" for the next 4 days.

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