Thank you for all your support guys ! in the run up to my operation your website was a great help to myself and my mum. i wanted to know everything that was going to happen to me and my mum wanted to understand more about my condiction !!

Thank you everyone !! xxxx

A vegetarian for 33 years, I was diagnosed with bicuspid aortic stenosis 24 years ago. At the time, I had just completed two years as a cardiovascular surgical assistant and was applying for medical school in Texas. My wife and I had our first born on the way and I made the decision not to pursue medical school. Talk about a gut punch! I knew exactly what I was in store for and that I’d have to deal with an ethical dilemma, beef heparin and the possibility of a porcine valve. I selected the St. Jude prosthetic valve implant but knew I would still be compromising my beliefs to literally save my life. Obviously, the will to live, as it should, won out. Ethical dilemmas like this might seem foolish to many, but after studying the life of Albert Schweitzer, St. Francis of Assisi and Gandhi, one begins to question the reality, albeit apparent necessity of animal sacrifice.

Now, I’m a 53 year old vegan and swim 60 Olympic lengths 3 times a week. Unless the powers that be have kept it from us, our current level of technology doesn’t support heart surgery that is vegetarian, vegan or for that matter without the element animal “ingredients.” We know that at some point in the future, stem cell research will provide us the ability to take a human cadaver valve and use it as a template to grow a heart valve from our own DNA! Moreover, synthetic heparin will also come about and perhaps the same way. This doesn’t lessen the enormous contribution animal research and animal tissues have made for our benefit. Simply, we could not have survived or developed these procedures with them.

As an animal rights enthusiast, one must be practical; one must be reasonable but never discount our ethical questions or our love for animals. Robyn Cairney is someone we should all be very proud of!

Rick

Being Jewish there were some question about this by my family so we talked to the rabbi.

He said your health and well being are more important.

So we say my valve is kosher!