Tag: PCI

Post-stent chest pain

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 306 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters 

A friend’s daughter (who happens to be a cardiac nurse) phoned to check on me a few days after I was discharged from the hospital following my heart attack. I felt so relieved to hear Kate’s voice because  something was really starting to worry me:  I was still having chest pain.

Hadn’t the blocked coronary artery that had caused my “widow maker” heart attack just recently been magically unblocked? Wasn’t that newly revascularized artery now propped wide open with a shiny metal stent? Shouldn’t I be feeling better?

And that’s when I heard the words “stretch pain”  for the first time.    .       .  Continue reading “Post-stent chest pain” →

Doc chat: in the cath lab with a “radial evangelist”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 16 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

Like most heart patients who get their blocked coronary arteries opened up (or “revascularized“) at Victoria’s Royal Jubilee Hospital, my stent was implanted by inserting a slim catheter into an artery in my wrist and threading it up, up, up into my heart, a procedure known in the cath labs of the world as a Transradial Intervention (TRI).

But if I had been in an American hospital, my cardiologist would have more than likely threaded that catheter through the larger femoral artery in my upper thigh instead of my wrist, despite growing evidence suggesting significantly safer results, less bleeding, fewer complications, superior outcomes, and resounding patient preference for the radial approach.(1) In fact, while cardiologists across Canada, Europe and Asia are moving towards using radial as a default access, American cardiologists lag behind. 

I just don’t get it. Canadian coronary arteries simply cannot be that much different from those of American heart patients. Continue reading “Doc chat: in the cath lab with a “radial evangelist”” →

10 things I didn’t know about angioplasty until I read this book

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 26 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥  @HeartSisters

heart-700141_1280 Being asked to write a book review is tricky. Authors hope you will be kind, while you hope the book at best might tell you something that every other book for heart patients hasn’t already told you. A review copy of the book Your Personal Guide: Angioplasty (Allen Jeremias, Susan S. Bartell)*  sat on my coffee table for weeks, until one day, I finally got tired of looking at this latest addition to my living room decor and decided to give it a go.   And within a very few pages, I learned some fascinating things I didn’t know before.   Continue reading “10 things I didn’t know about angioplasty until I read this book” →

How do patients know if their docs “will never be good”?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 44 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥  @HeartSisters

It all started when cardiologist Dr. William Dillon of Louisville, Kentucky made this observation on his Twitter page about doing cardiac catheterization procedures:

As a two-time veteran of transradial (wrist) caths*, I felt just a wee bit alarmed by the last line of his tweet. We heart patients tend to get a wee bit alarmed by implications that those we trust may “never be good” at what they’ve just done to us, as described by the very people who work alongside them – those known as interventional cardiologists.

I felt similarly alarmed, by the way, during the recent FDA recall of defective Riata cardiac defibrillator leads when Dr. Laurence Epstein of Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital told Heartwire interviewers that ICD leads  are sometimes “implanted poorly”, bluntly adding:

“You can’t account for knuckleheads putting them in. Some lead failures are going to be expected . . . Others fail because people put them in in horrible ways.”   Continue reading “How do patients know if their docs “will never be good”?” →