{"id":627,"date":"2008-11-08T12:09:38","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T17:09:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2008\/11\/08\/pumphead-vs-dumbhead\/"},"modified":"2019-02-26T22:02:42","modified_gmt":"2019-02-27T03:02:42","slug":"pumphead-vs-dumbhead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/2008\/11\/08\/pumphead-vs-dumbhead\/","title":{"rendered":"Pumphead vs. Dumbhead… From Spike"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the past we’ve talked about pumphead, the post-operative condition<\/a> that negatively impacts the cognitive capabilities of some<\/em> heart surgery patients. Well, Spike (from Nevada) just emailed me a new patient term. He calls it “dumbhead”.<\/p>\n

Although Spike’s new term is quite playful, his story (posted below) illustrates several key concerns for heart valve surgery patients. So you know, Spike is a 63-year old male, medically retired US Marine. His valve surgery was performed in Las Vegas at the Summerlyn Heart Institute by Dr. Demetri Mavroidis.<\/p>\n

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Dear Adam,<\/p>\n

I had a mitral valve replacement (tissue valve)<\/a> and a maze procedure on September 9, 2008. I was released from the hospital five days later on September 14th.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first of my two dumbhead incidents took place on the second morning after my homecoming.<\/p>\n

I failed to consider the amount of blood I lost during surgery. I got up at 5:00am to get a pain pill. Sometime later, I awoke on my tile kitchen floor with a large goose egg on the back of my head, a sprained ankle and… I was lying in a small pool of urine. I banged on the floor until my son awoke and called the paramedics. This resulted in another hospital stay of 36 hours.<\/p>\n

The second and more serious of my dumbhead blunders was ignoring my weekly blood tests. I was on Coumadin prior to my surgery<\/a>. The dosage was increased after my operation. I had my blood tested two weeks after surgery and my clotting factor was good. However, I ignored the test for the next three weeks. I hated to have to ask someone to drive me to the lab for this test.<\/p>\n

Last Monday, I had lost my skin color and I couldn’t move without being short of breath. I felt worse than right after the surgery. I had a bowel movement like tar and called the doctor. He told me to go directly to the emergency room as it sounded like I was bleeding from the gut.<\/p>\n

To shorten the story, my PT clotting factor was supposed to be between 1-2; mine was a 9 and my hemoglobin was 6.2. They put me in the I.C.U. and gave me 5 units of plasma, 5 units of whole blood, lasix, potassium, proton pump inhibitors and vitamin K. I also had to endure an endoscopy and colonoscopy.<\/p>\n

I was released Thursday evening feeling weak but much better. All this could have been avoided if I had gotten the weekly blood checks and did not accept my deterioration as a normal part of the post-operative condition. Also, I now know that part of my dumbhead moves were caused by the cardiac depression you mentioned in your book.<\/p>\n

Please pass this along to your readers. I hope future patients and caregivers can learn from my mistakes.<\/p>\n

Thanks for everything!<\/p>\n

Spike<\/p>\n

PS: Despite my stupidity… Your heart valve surgery book prepared me for the experience and the success stories buoyed my spirits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recovery"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/heart-surgery-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}