My Aortic Adventure

On May 9th, I met the man who, one day very soon, will cut my heart open.  After my cardiologist determined that my Aortic Valve was too narrow, and the regurgitation caused by it is too extreme, I was sent to see a cardiac/thoracic surgeon named Doctor Miller. As we discussed all of the information about my heart that I already knew, and already mentioned in my first blog post, something new came up.  In addition to having a faulty valve, my Ascending Aorta is also oversized.  Basically, at birth my body lacked a protein.  The result is that my Aortic Valve has two cusps instead of the normal three and that my Ascending Aorta has expanded.  A normal Ascending Aorta is 2.5cm in diameter.  My Aorta is 4.7 cm. This is something that I was not aware of, but is apparently pretty common.  When a cardiologist looks at an Echocardiogram, I guess that the focus is the valve function, and sometimes the Ascending Aorta is not noticed. So what does this all mean?  In addition to needing an

My Heart History When I was born, there was a complication.  My Aorta valve, the one responsible for pumping oxygenated blood from my heart into my body, was too narrow.  In fact, it was so narrow that I needed an emergency surgery to keep me alive.  Luckily, doctors knew what to do.  They placed a flexible tube into my femoral artery, traced it all of he way to my heart, stuck a balloon into the narrow valve, inflated the balloon, and widened the narrowing enough to keep me alive.  This is called a  Balloon Valvuloplasty .  One cannot make this kind of thing up. This emergency surgery was meant to last me until I was fully grown, at which point I would need my Aortic Valve replaced. So I waited.  I had yearly check-ups until I was 18, the point when docs said I would need a replacement valve.  18 years old came and went and the doctors decided that 21 was my new goal.  I made it to 21 years of age with no issue so we decided to keep waiting.  This game continued until last ye