My Nephew is Being Given an Artificial Aorta (Dacron!) Today

Modern medicine is beyond my imagination. My nephew Steve is in an operating room in a Chicago hospital as I write this, having been airlifted to Chicago from Indiana more than a week ago. His 8 to 10 hour surgery began sometime this morning, and when it is over he will have a Dacron aorta inside his body. Dacron - I would never have dreamed that was possible!

Here is all I know about the operation to implant the artificial aorta, learned through an email from a family member:

"It is a very dangerous surgery. They will replace his aorta from below the heart down to his left leg with a man-made one made of Dacron. It is a very long and complicated surgery with some timeframe deadlines involved. He will be on a heart/lung machine during surgery. After they replace the aorta, they need to reconnect all the blood vessels. They can't have his spine, liver and kidney disconnected for more than 5 hours. To do so will cause permanent damage and probably paralysis. The whole surgery will probably last 8-10 hours."

Steve had an emergency surgery a week ago to stop the bleeding from previous grafts made to his aorta, and he faces another in the future because an aneurysm was discovered in his stomach which is also life threatening.

Some background

On January 1, 2010 I published an article detailing the first of Steve's problems. See: Caution: a Violent Cough Can Be Very Dangerous!

On December 29, 2009 Steve had been airlifted from Indiana to Chicago in order to receive surgery to repair tears to his aorta. There were many touch-and-go situations, which I wrote about in this article. Steve was in intensive care when I wrote that article.

Surgeons had relayed to the immediate family at that time that the entire problem was very likely caused by the severe coughing that my nephew had been experiencing for a number of days, and that the coughing had been so intense as to cause a long tear in the aorta . This remains conjecture because nothing of this sort can be proven one way or the other.

I followed up with this article on January 7, 2010: An Update to "Caution: a Violent Cough Can Be Very Dangerous! This is an excerpt from what I wrote at that time:

My nephew has remained in the intensive care unit, and he needed to have an 11-hour operation performed on Tuesday, January 5th. Surgeons had placed a stent in his aorta during his first surgery, but now his aorta below the stent was ripped. The doctors had to do some grafting to strengthen the area and then perform a bypass operation around the original repair. My nephew has also been battling pneumonia .

I added this comment to the article on 1/15/10: I'm updating with this information that I received today in an email from my niece: "Great news today! Steven is being moved to a regular room today. They will concentrate on physical therapy. Also, he is no longer on dialysis! Evidently, he is making sufficient urine on his own and no longer needs it. Who knew urine would be such a wonderful email topic! Thanks to all of you for your thoughts and prayers. Pat" (Needless to say our family is celebrating this news. Thanks much to all of the AC contributors who sent me encouraging messages! )

Events since 1/15/10

Steve has continued to be in and out of hospitals, has been through extensive physical therapy, has experienced speech difficulty because the breathing tube used during the long surgery affected his vocal cords, has had many surgeries to close the wounds from stripping veins, etc. and etc.

And now Steve will have an artificial aorta. I'm believing that after all the surgeries are over, the Dacron aorta that will have replaced the leaky, damaged natural aorta will provide a means for healing and restoration to flow through Steve's body, and the life-threatening aneurysm will have been successfully repaired. We are wondrously made with great healing capabilities.

I'll post an update on this, either by a comment or another article. I'm not publishing this in health and wellness as there is no opportunity for comments in that category at this time, and I want to be able to add a comment later regarding his condition.

See:
Caution: a Violent Cough Can Be Very Dangerous!
An Update to "Caution: a Violent Cough Can Be Very Dangerous!

Source: My emails from my family