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Tuesday, August 21, 2018

SAVR px week


Thursday morning I'm getting my severely stenotic aortic valve replaced (via the "old-fashioned" open-heart SAVR px, same one my late Dad had 22 years ago at age 80). I am out of time. I've pushed the envelope all the way, owing mostly to Danielle's illness. See "My 'Check Engine' light." So, I'll probably be off line for a bit. Friday is likely to be a crappy day in the cardiac ICU. I'm told to expect 4-8 days in the hospital, depending on my post-op progress.

Interesting: During my pre-op visit last Thursday, among the many tests they ran on me was a nasal swab for "Staph au."

Then I ran across this in a book I just started:
...the global medical challenge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a quiet crisis destined to become noisier. Dangerous bugs such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which kills more than eleven thousand people annually in the United States and many more thousands around the world) can abruptly acquire whole kits of drug-resistance genes, from entirely different kinds of bacteria, by horizontal gene transfer. That’s why the problem of multiple-drug-resistant superbugs—unkillable bacteria—has spread around the world so quickly. By such revelations, both practical and profound, we’re suddenly challenged to adjust our basic understandings of who we humans are, what has gone into the making of us, and how the living world works.

Quammen, David. The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (Kindle Locations 65-71). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

My assays were negative. The pre-op nurse had told me that the general environmental staph contamination prevalence was now at about 30% (meaning, were you to touch anything randomly while out in public, you'd have ~30% chance of coming in contact with the staph bug).

More on David Quammen's book here, from Science Friday. Looks like a great read. "HGT?" (Horizontal Gene Transfer). Great. Add one more complex phenomenon to the "Omics" pile for medical science and practice to have to weed through.

UPDATE

 

Yeah. I've talked to a bunch of my friends who've been through Open Heart px's. Comforting.

OK, THIS IS FUNNY

From Science Based Medicine:
Bouffant caps versus skull caps in the operating room: A no holds barred cage match
Over the last few years, AORN and the American College of Surgeons have been battling it out over AORN’s 2014 guideline that has increasingly led to the banning of the surgical skull cap in the operating room in favor of the bouffant cap. Lacking from this kerfuffle has been much in the way of evidence to support AORN’s guideline, but unfortunately that didn’t stop the ACS from appealing mainly to tradition and emotion in objecting to it...
I guess I'll be looking.

8-22 ERRATUM


SAVE THE DATES: SEPT 16TH - 18TH, 2018

THE Health IT event of the year.
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More to come...

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