unclefish said:
My Dad had has three aortic valve replacements. The first was open heart when he was 59......that one lasted 16 years. The next one was done via the TAVR procedure when he was 75. The valve replaced via TAVR lasted 8 years and he just had open heart surgery to replace the valve again at age 83. He came through just fine and is home doing rehab.
Most hospitals won't do a TAVR procedure if you are under 60 years old.....because they usually can only do it once because there is only so much room inside the aortic valve area. During the TAVR they don't remove the faulty valve they just place a smaller valve inside the faulty one.
I will tell you a brief story of a dear friend of mine that just had valve replacement surgery three weeks ago at St. Lukes in Houston. Too young to have the TAVR so they did open heart. He got through the procedure ok but an hour after surgery he "coded". They tried for an hour to revive him and finally got a pulse.....but the damage was done. His organs started failing and they took him off life support the next day. He was 57.....just tragic. He was one of the 3% that don't make out of the hospital from that open heart procedure.
I used to know a guy who had his first aortic vale replacement when he was in his early teens and had to have them replaced periodically. He said that the shortest time between replacements he had was about two months.
When I took the Navy physical in the spring of 1974, they found an issue with my heart that caused me to flunk the physical. The first diagnosis was a bad valve.
That summer I entered the Texas Heart Institute at Saint Luke's and Dr Denton Cooley changed the diagnosis to an atrial septal defect -- a hole in the heart. He told me that without surgery, I had about five years to live and last year of that I would be in a nursing home and unable to get out of bed. He said that with the surgery, there was a good chance that I would live longer.
He operated the next morning and I am still here 51 years later.
