Day in the Life: Heart Surgeon

Okay, 6 a.m. right on time. It's the story of my professional life, getting to the hospital in the dark and going home in the dark. We have surgery this morning. We operate most mornings. We're doing open heart surgery on a patient this morning, a minimally invasive mitral valve repair through a little incision in the side. Ready to go. Patients are nervous before open heart surgery. It's pretty understandable, but I always tell them the important thing is I'm not nervous. Hey, good morning. So, you showed up, huh? That's half the battle. Just showing up is half the battle. Yeah. You all set for today? So, it's just like we talked about in the office. We're going to work on fixing your mitral valve. We're going to do a little two-inch incision in the side. Yeah. Everything is favorable for that. Yeah. So, just like we talked about. So, anything go on last night I need to know about? No major issues. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's go down to the ICU and we can review the patients that are there. Okay. Good morning, everybody. What's the plan? The plan is to if we can get the tubes out today, maybe keep the wires another day. Okay. And send them upstairs. Can you go upstairs today? Yes. Okay. Very good. Any issues we need to take care of before I go to the operating room? No, sir. No. Okay. All right. All right. Have a good day and I'll catch up with you on the floor after surgery. Okay. Thanks. The operation is like a well-choreographed ballet where a lot of everyone knows their role. The technicians and the scrub techs and the perfusionists who run the heart lung machine. All these people are very sophisticated. They don't know exactly what to do. So, the environment is very controlled. It's very pleasant. We actually listen to music. Now, the kind of music that we listen to is always a question. If it were up to me, I'd listen to classical music. But I've got a lot of 20-somethings and 30-somethings in there that if they listen to classical music, they get bored. So, in order to keep them happy, I listen to rap or hip-hop and a lot of pop music. If you do something 1,000 times or 10,000 times, you get the sequence in your mind. And then the only thing you have to do is be ready for unexpected circumstances, which in a case like this would be very, very unusual. Okay. So, I've got these special magnifying lenses on called LUX and it allows me to see inside. They magnify 3.5 times, so everything looks very big and very close. And it helps us to evaluate valves and coronary arteries. Okay. Well, we're all finished. Surgery's over. Everything went fine. We were able to fix the patient's valve through a little two-inch incision. He was stable through the whole time and I'm completely satisfied. So, now let's go give the good news. Okay. Everything went great. Yeah, we're all done. The operation was nice and smooth. Everything went fine. Okay. The nurses will give you a full briefing on what to expect once you see him in the ICU. Okay? I appreciate it. Thank you so much, doc. Okay. We'll talk later. Okay. All right. Okay. Well, the first case is over and I had a successful completion, so I'm pretty satisfied. One thing about cardiac surgery is that every day is a new day. It's exciting. I've never been bored a single day in my entire career. So, all in all, it's a pleasure and it's an honor to operate on patients and be entrusted with their care.