JonJustice
Member
I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself as I have been coming here for a few years but only recently did I sign up as a member. My name is Jon and before I tell my story below I want to say thanks for being here. I have learned a lot and been comforted by reading the posts of so many of you. Hopefully my story can too provide some knowledge or comfort as I found with others stories.
On Friday Feb 13th of 2009 my life took a drastic turn. At 3pm in afternoon my wife drove me to Urgent Care as I was suffering from chest pains. I was immediately sent to Northwest Medical center here in Tucson as I was having a heart attack. During that time it was discovered that I had a bi-cuspid heart valve causing blood clotting that had moved into my arteries and attached to the valve I was also suffering from an ascending aortic aneurysm. I was sent home with plans to be made to undergo open heart surgery to correct both issues in the months ahead. The following Friday I had a second heart attack at which time it was decided that I had to undergo the surgery as soon as possible. On Feb 22nd I had open heart surgery where I was given a replacement titanium heart valve and a graft replacing the aneurysm on my aorta.*
After the surgery I was placed on blood pressure medication (coreg) and warfarin.
On July 4th of 2009 on a trip to Southern California to visit family I started having some pretty bad unexplained chest pain that freaked me out. ( still no cause for the pain was found, but everything happens for a reason) I went to the ER at Lakewood Regional medical center at which time they did a CT scan. The scan showed a large contrast mass around my heart. ER Dr feared I had a leak, but a CardioVascular surgeon said it was left over "debris", blood etc, from the surgery. He was wrong, but I would not find this out until 3 years later. (more on that in a moment)
A year after the surgery I ended up with another major complication. Due to my blood being thin and not knowing how it got there I was inflicted with a small child football size hematoma in my abdominal area on my right side in the tissue. At the time surgery was not an option as it was too dangerous. 8mths later the hematoma got infected and became an huge Abscess. Surgery was required to remove it leaving a gaping hold in my side that had to be cared for for almost 3mths. It has since healed and I now have what I like to describe as a scare in my side that looks like a shopping cart dent hitting a car door.*
Which brings me to the current day. A little more about me....will be 40 in July and have a wife Melinda of 12 years along with 2 wonderful sons Logan 9 and Kyle 5. I *had been seeing a personal strength trainer 3x a week for the past nine months while totally changing my diet. I had lost 30lbs and put on 25 lbs of muscle.
On April 5th I admitted my self to the ER after my trainer and chiropractor couldn't figure out why I was having some intense upper right back shoulder pain. Again a CT scan was done. The ER Dr said the pain was just tense muscles, but just like in 2009 he saw that same mass around my heart. This time a cardio thoracic surgeon saw it and immediately sent me to the ICU. After they sent a sonogram camera down my throat to the aorta they discovered I indeed had some type of leak in my graft.
I had my second OHS on April 10th. What they discovered was something everyone involved said they had never seen seen.*
It would appear the 2009 surgeon took the pericardial sack around my heart and pulled it up around my aorta due to excess bleeding. (surgeons do this apparently when there is excess bleeding as a precautionary measure) When the surgeon opened the pericardial sack for the second surgery he found a baseball sized pulsating mass of dried blood attached to my graft. At this point I wasn't on bypass, but he made the choice to go ahead and stop my heart for safety. After cutting away the mass, exposing my graft, he found a tiny hole about the size of a pen head. He sutured up the hole a few times for added measure and closed me up. The clot had contained the leak and were it to have come apart the Dr said I would have lasted about 5 pumps of my heart before I would have died.
So what happened to create the hole? There are 2 theories. First one is the graft was defective and because the surgeon in 09, not knowing there was a hole, took the pericardial tissue and wrapped it around my aorta it, created*an enclosed area that caused the leak to form the large clot and contain itself for the past 3 years. The other theory and probably more likely, is that during the process of sewing up the pericardial tissue around the graft, the surgeon punctured the graft and thus created the hole by mistake. But again, the pericardial tissue kept the leak enclosed and thus formed the giant clot keeping the leak contained.
The surgeon also found small area of viridans streptococcus bacteria during the second surgery. None of this bacteria reached my valve or graft. The Dr's don't believe I have any other infection and this was an isolated clump. I am however doing home injections for 5 weeks via a picc IV line with antibiotics and then will be given a pill form of these same antibiotics for the rest of my life, just to be safe.
Needless to say I am glad to be finally fixed and this second recovery has gone much smoother and has been much easier than the first, mostly because I am in much better physical shape than the last time.
Thanks for reading me story and I am glad to be here.
Jon
On Friday Feb 13th of 2009 my life took a drastic turn. At 3pm in afternoon my wife drove me to Urgent Care as I was suffering from chest pains. I was immediately sent to Northwest Medical center here in Tucson as I was having a heart attack. During that time it was discovered that I had a bi-cuspid heart valve causing blood clotting that had moved into my arteries and attached to the valve I was also suffering from an ascending aortic aneurysm. I was sent home with plans to be made to undergo open heart surgery to correct both issues in the months ahead. The following Friday I had a second heart attack at which time it was decided that I had to undergo the surgery as soon as possible. On Feb 22nd I had open heart surgery where I was given a replacement titanium heart valve and a graft replacing the aneurysm on my aorta.*
After the surgery I was placed on blood pressure medication (coreg) and warfarin.
On July 4th of 2009 on a trip to Southern California to visit family I started having some pretty bad unexplained chest pain that freaked me out. ( still no cause for the pain was found, but everything happens for a reason) I went to the ER at Lakewood Regional medical center at which time they did a CT scan. The scan showed a large contrast mass around my heart. ER Dr feared I had a leak, but a CardioVascular surgeon said it was left over "debris", blood etc, from the surgery. He was wrong, but I would not find this out until 3 years later. (more on that in a moment)
A year after the surgery I ended up with another major complication. Due to my blood being thin and not knowing how it got there I was inflicted with a small child football size hematoma in my abdominal area on my right side in the tissue. At the time surgery was not an option as it was too dangerous. 8mths later the hematoma got infected and became an huge Abscess. Surgery was required to remove it leaving a gaping hold in my side that had to be cared for for almost 3mths. It has since healed and I now have what I like to describe as a scare in my side that looks like a shopping cart dent hitting a car door.*
Which brings me to the current day. A little more about me....will be 40 in July and have a wife Melinda of 12 years along with 2 wonderful sons Logan 9 and Kyle 5. I *had been seeing a personal strength trainer 3x a week for the past nine months while totally changing my diet. I had lost 30lbs and put on 25 lbs of muscle.
On April 5th I admitted my self to the ER after my trainer and chiropractor couldn't figure out why I was having some intense upper right back shoulder pain. Again a CT scan was done. The ER Dr said the pain was just tense muscles, but just like in 2009 he saw that same mass around my heart. This time a cardio thoracic surgeon saw it and immediately sent me to the ICU. After they sent a sonogram camera down my throat to the aorta they discovered I indeed had some type of leak in my graft.
I had my second OHS on April 10th. What they discovered was something everyone involved said they had never seen seen.*
It would appear the 2009 surgeon took the pericardial sack around my heart and pulled it up around my aorta due to excess bleeding. (surgeons do this apparently when there is excess bleeding as a precautionary measure) When the surgeon opened the pericardial sack for the second surgery he found a baseball sized pulsating mass of dried blood attached to my graft. At this point I wasn't on bypass, but he made the choice to go ahead and stop my heart for safety. After cutting away the mass, exposing my graft, he found a tiny hole about the size of a pen head. He sutured up the hole a few times for added measure and closed me up. The clot had contained the leak and were it to have come apart the Dr said I would have lasted about 5 pumps of my heart before I would have died.
So what happened to create the hole? There are 2 theories. First one is the graft was defective and because the surgeon in 09, not knowing there was a hole, took the pericardial tissue and wrapped it around my aorta it, created*an enclosed area that caused the leak to form the large clot and contain itself for the past 3 years. The other theory and probably more likely, is that during the process of sewing up the pericardial tissue around the graft, the surgeon punctured the graft and thus created the hole by mistake. But again, the pericardial tissue kept the leak enclosed and thus formed the giant clot keeping the leak contained.
The surgeon also found small area of viridans streptococcus bacteria during the second surgery. None of this bacteria reached my valve or graft. The Dr's don't believe I have any other infection and this was an isolated clump. I am however doing home injections for 5 weeks via a picc IV line with antibiotics and then will be given a pill form of these same antibiotics for the rest of my life, just to be safe.
Needless to say I am glad to be finally fixed and this second recovery has gone much smoother and has been much easier than the first, mostly because I am in much better physical shape than the last time.
Thanks for reading me story and I am glad to be here.
Jon
