Quick Update: for those of you that actively read this blog (if there are people who do), both Dr. Nguyen and I were out of town last week, making me unable to attend. He will be gone this following Friday as well. I might be going this Wednesday if possible, or at the least discussing the animation project with him and using that info as the next blog post.
Last Friday, I spent most of the morning in the hospital at valve conference. Most of the patients had aortic or mitral stenosis, with nothing too irregular. None of the patients had extreme defects or early heart irregularities, and were mostly old patients in their 70s and 80s that had a past of heart disease. I’ll talk about a few of the cases.
The first was 66 y/o woman with mitral regurgitation (valve is loose, leaks when pumping blood or drawing blood into the heart), moderate-to-severe in condition. Most of the cardiologists in the room recommended a MitraClip, a minimally invasive catheter-based valve repair device. This did not take long to go over, but more interesting and lengthy case discussions followed shortly after. Another patient had a bypass done in the early 2000s, with a subsequent aortic valve replacement in 2005 that came with some complications. Heading to the present, she was recently admitted to the hospital with acute kidney injury (as well as the continued heart problems), and has been on dialysis almost every day because of this. Aside from her kidney issues, she needed work on both her aortic and mitral valves. Going even further, her lungs were functioning poorly. There was a long discussion over how to deal with this woman’s serious conditions- she’s a high-risk patient with limited long term benefits from invasive surgery, so the best thing right now would be simple medical care and making the rest of the time she has left pleasant. Just being in the room while these talks deciding a person’s life were happening feels very odd, but I’m glad that I was able to get a glimpse into the harder decisions that must be made in a hospital.
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