LVAD
First -- oh blog, I'm sorry I have forsaken thee.
Look at this little guy -- pretty slick eh?
It's called a Left-Ventricular-Assist-Device, or LVAD for short. The left ventricle is the moneymaker of the heart (hey don't tell the right ventricle!). It is the chamber in the mammalian heart that pumps the oxygenated blood from the legs throughout the whole body.
When a person's heart fails -- say, Dick Cheney's -- the heart no longer squeezes as it should. It fails to act as an efficient pump. The most common reason for heart failure in the US is that the heart has been starved from blood for too long. This is your old man's angina. Plugged up arteries starve the heart, it dies, begins to balloon out and fail.
LVADs are installed to buy people with severely failing hearts a year or two extra. Tops. It is a pump that sucks blood from the weakened left ventricle and squirts it right into the aorta. This is where my guit-happy story begins.
I saw in the news today that Dick Cheney is recovering from LVAD placement. This means that he is going to last 2 years max, and given his epic cardiac history, 2 years is a long shot. The take away from this is that he has an LVAD because he is not a transplant candidate any more than he is a presidential candidate.
Unless he's planning some FDR-Truman-inspired fiasco.
First -- oh blog, I'm sorry I have forsaken thee.
Look at this little guy -- pretty slick eh?
It's called a Left-Ventricular-Assist-Device, or LVAD for short. The left ventricle is the moneymaker of the heart (hey don't tell the right ventricle!). It is the chamber in the mammalian heart that pumps the oxygenated blood from the legs throughout the whole body.When a person's heart fails -- say, Dick Cheney's -- the heart no longer squeezes as it should. It fails to act as an efficient pump. The most common reason for heart failure in the US is that the heart has been starved from blood for too long. This is your old man's angina. Plugged up arteries starve the heart, it dies, begins to balloon out and fail.
LVADs are installed to buy people with severely failing hearts a year or two extra. Tops. It is a pump that sucks blood from the weakened left ventricle and squirts it right into the aorta. This is where my guit-happy story begins.
I saw in the news today that Dick Cheney is recovering from LVAD placement. This means that he is going to last 2 years max, and given his epic cardiac history, 2 years is a long shot. The take away from this is that he has an LVAD because he is not a transplant candidate any more than he is a presidential candidate.
Unless he's planning some FDR-Truman-inspired fiasco.
4 Comments:
At 11:11 PM,
Maria said…
Oh, Ryan, if it were so. The picture you have up is the heart mate I, I'm sure Dick got a HMII. That has a life of at least 5 years. The heart mate II works differently with no pumping mechanism so there for less to break down. Also, lots of people use VAD's to bridge to transplant (not the Cheney is).
At 11:39 AM,
MINI-APPL said…
Dammit! Hey -- I applying to your hospital :D also my friend just started as an intern there. Also what is your address? Also I will email these questions!
At 10:24 PM,
Maria said…
Saddly I will be leaving Mass General next wednesday. I am going to go to Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. I will really be sad if you end up at MGH like a year after I left. Where is you friend interning? I hope not cardiac surgery as he will be shat upon. I will email you my address.
At 10:24 PM,
Maria said…
Saddly I will be leaving Mass General next wednesday. I am going to go to Northwestern Hospital in Chicago. I will really be sad if you end up at MGH like a year after I left. Where is you friend interning? I hope not cardiac surgery as he will be shat upon. I will email you my address.
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