If the Henry Ford doctors, as a team, hadn't followed through with what they've learned I'm
a firm believer I wouldn't have been here. And I'm a firm believer that I was dead. So
Mr. Bennett actually presented with some atypical symptoms, he has risk factors including diabetes.
Now, the strength of his heart was okay, but a stress test that was done to confirm whether
or not he truly had blockage was considered a high-risk stress test. It showed that several
areas of his heart were affected. When we brought him initially for diagnostic cardiac
catheterization we went through his wrist artery, and we noted that there were blockages
in all three of his major heart arteries.
Two weeks ago I went in to my family doctor
thinking I had bronchitis. They sent me down here because I was also coughing up some blood,
and the emergency room ran a bunch of tests. Subsequent checks and everything else I found
out I had seven blocked arteries in my heart. In such patients, especially when they're
diabetic, we sometimes suggest or sometimes recommend that patients seek bypass surgery
or surgical revascularization, and because he was stable at the time we brought him off
the table and had him and his wife meet with the surgeons for a second opinion. He and
the surgeons talked, and he was offered both a complete surgical procedure as well as a
part-surgical, part-angioplasty and stent procedure. I'm going to have two more stents
added. We, the first procedure we had four stents, so I know going in that it's going
to be fairly easy and fairly quick and non-invasive and it probably won't hurt that much, but
yeah I'm nervous because they're going to go work on my heart. The advantage with the
wrist artery is that it's very superficial, which means it resides very close to the skin;
there's no major veins or nerves, we eliminate the risk of injury to any vein or nerve in
that area; it is virtually impossible to have a major bleeding event because it's so superficial;
we can actually send the patients home the same day, so that instead of recovering in
our hospital bed, they're actually recovering in their own bed at home.
What we're going to do is basically go into the artery like this, and remove the needle out and then we're
going to get blood flow and through which we're going to put a wire, and over the wire
we'll place a sheath. This is the wire that we're going to use. So now we're going to
access into the artery, we're able to thread the wire like this. Remove the wire, this
is still in the artery, and then this just slides over the wire, and that'll slide right
into the artery and that's the one-way tube that we have that we can then put all our
other equipment through. This is what's called our guiding catheter, this is a small tube
that will go through the sheath that we have that will allow us to pass our wires and equipment
through. We've got a little bit of blood flow there, we're going to go through the back
wall or the posterior wall of the artery, remove the needle, slowly pulling back waiting
for a nice spurt to come out. And thread the wire in, advance a little bit, it's going
smoothly. That's our wire, it's halfway up the arm. And so what we'll do is we'll inflate
the balloon just like we did with the prior angioplasty, but because the stent's on the
balloon it's going to expand the stent. When we deflate the balloon, the stent stays expanded
against the artery wall, and the balloon can actually come out. And the stent is made of metal
with some coated medication and remains in there for life. So we're now pushing the hydrophilic
wire into a small branch. Little bit of pressure here, sir, okay? 1.0 would be okay, yeah,
1.0 I think should be fine.
So how's he doing? He's doing very well, his vital signs are
stable, hemoglobin's good. Great! Well, let me take a quick look, listen, and inspection.
Sounds fine. You feel good, you feel ready to go home? No signs of bleeding. We'll take
this band off and we'll get you going. Thank you. Yup, you're welcome. I think Mr. Bennett's
prognosis is actually very good. With such patients, such select patients, we're actually
able -- because they're so stable and we've eliminated the risk of bleeding, and we've
eliminated the risk of a major complication with his heart -- we've been able to take
a group of patients like him and actually send them home on the same day. Within about
four hours I was walking around, and I just wanted to get mobile. I think it was six o'clock
I was coming home, had dinner with my family, I went to bed about nine o'clock and the next
morning I was up six-thirty taking my kids to school, kind of an amazing recovery. My
wife, when she first started nursing, she started in the cardiac unit, and she's as
amazed as I am how quickly your recovery is via radial procedure. No complications, no
infections, and how quickly a person can come home.