Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a diseased or malfunctioning aortic valve with a man-made valve. The procedure is performed under X-ray guidance and uses smaller incisions than open-heart valve surgery. Both the previous definition of TAVR and the following definition of Gemini are from Gemini, a multimodal model from Google DeepMind, is capable of understanding virtually any input, combining different types of information, and generating almost any output.
When I woke up in the recovery room after my heart valve operation, I felt great. Shockingly great. For the first time in months, I could breathe. It’s been 48 hours, and I can breathe even better now.
I am getting a new aorta valve this Wednesday. Well, that’s accurate but a little misleading. I already have a replacement aorta valve, but it is starting to wear out. Rather than opening me up and taking the old – replacement – valve out, the doctors are going to leave it in place and insert a new valve into the old one in an operation called a Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (although, as I understand it, they don’t replace the valve as much as insert the new valve inside my trusty old Edwards Lifesciences valve). This is all done from outside my body by fishing the new valve parts up from my groin through one of my arteries or veins and attaching it to the old valve from the other artery (or vein).
I go into the hospital at 5:45 and go through about an hour and a half of prep in the prep room and then another hour of prep in the surgery room, and the procedure itself will take about an hour. I should be awake by noon and leave the hospital Thursday or Friday. My regular cardiologist will be in the room as well as another surgeon – who operated on me when I had a pseudo-aneurism in 2007 – in case something goes wrong and they have to open me up. It should be easy and relatively painless but I am still sort of freaked out about it.
The shortness of the procedure—and, for that matter, even calling it a procedure—camouflages the truth that this is a big deal—for me, at least, and, I hope, for the surgeon—and lots of things can go wrong. Still, going wrong is unusual, and lots more can go right, and I am planning on that.
To start with, the biggest thing in our lives during the last couple of weeks, Michele has bacterial pneumonia. Well, she had it for about the last three weeks, but she is now on the mend. Even as an observer, I can tell you bacterial pneumonia sucks. It started as if it were the flu and then just continued to get worse. When we still thought it was the flu, Michele suggested I go to Richard and Tracy’s weekend home at Point Reyes Station without her to see Tracy’s parents, Arlene and Al Grubbs.
I agreed, and the payoff for the cold and wet winter was my drive through Marin’s acid-green hills. The payoff for the drive was a lunch of delicious pizza made by Richard and Tracy in their wood-burning oven and seeing Arlene and Al.
I had brought my camera and watching, through the viewfinder, Courtney and Arlene play Bocci Ball with Richard and Gina, I felt like I was watching a photo shoot for Vanity Fair, or, maybe, Fashionable Country Living. The grass was so green, and the background of the Point Reyes Hills was picture-perfect. For me, it was a perfect sweet spring day.
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!” Stephen Hawking in the intro to A Brief History of Time.
Today was a beautiful Spring Day, warm under a clear blue sky. It seems like the long, cold, rainy winter is ending.
Both my email and my blog disappeared last week at about the time Michele left for Mexico, although there is no connection between the two. I know Michele went to Mexico to see the Great Eclipse, but I have no idea why or even how the blog and attached email disappeared; all I know is that, when I went to make an entry in the blog, it wasn’t there. All I got was a sign that said This site can’t be reached. Check if there is a typo in srstern.com.
Every morning, I would get up and go to my website only to see This site can’t be reached. I would text Michele, and she would tell me that she was working on it and that the site was still there. She would say, “They say, ‘They can see it.'” whatever that means. About a day after I gave up – but, obviously, Michele hadn’t – there it was…back.
Also, on the good news front, I am getting a new heart valve—or, to be more accurate, a Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement. This means that they will not have to open my chest to get to my heart; they will just fish a new bioprosthetic valve in through my groin and up a vein to my heart. In my imagination’s eye, it is sort of like one of those collapsable paper umbrellas you get with rum drinks, only safer. The cheery handout I got from the surgeon’s office said that it will Help you live longer, Helps you feel better, Less invasive procedure, Shorter recovery time and Almost 98 out of a 100 patients are still living within two years and more than 2 in 100 patients will die.
So, as far as I am concerned, it is good news All The Way Down.
About two weeks ago, I caught the flu – I have no idea how – and I ended up in the hospital. In retrospect, that may be the good news. I have an artificial aorta valve, which, when I got it in 2002, had a projected life of about eighteen years. But I have now had the valve for almost twenty-two years, and, recently, I’ve been having trouble breathing. I’ve been complaining that the valve is starting to give out, but my doctors didn’t seem to feel any sense of urgency. My stay in the hospital has changed their minds. This is all by way of saying that I’m not particularly hale or hearty, but I hope I will be so, with a new valve, in a couple of months.
In the meantime, here are some pictures from an aborted trip to Death Valley. It was aborted because the adjustable suspension on our VW Touareg started to give out, and the warning on the dashboard started flashing: Stop! Apparently, a rat had chewed through one of the hydraulic lines, so we limped west to Lone Pine and then north to Reno.
