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Hi @RAS, That’s interesting. Thank you for sharing your experience. I wish I knew whether cases like yours could/should be extrapolated so as to protect everyone with a mechanical heart valve, or not. Slogging through academic papers continues... Take care. Thank you again.

I just re-listened to our conversation and he said: “Let’s stop the aspirin. You’ve been far out from the surgery. I don’t think that’s beneficial. This is a high-flow valve, and you’re on Warfarin... and no one generally takes aspirin. Your heart function is normal. This would be very unlikely...

This is already the fifth cardiologist I’ve tried in as many months. None of them really seem to give a ****. Or seems to know what they’re even doing. It’s... disheartening, to say it in a nice way..... but that’s just the way it is. I don’t know how to find a decent one. I’ve tried letting my...

Hello all. I’m 5 months post-op with a mechanical St Jude AVR. My incision finally closed up enough to get an echo done today, and the new cardiologist I saw afterwards advised me to stop taking the daily 81 mg of aspirin. Meanwhile my surgeon has said I need to take it for the rest of my life...

Hi Katerina, have the pains you wrote of gone away? Or do you just get used to it? Did you ever find a nice tight-fitting body suit? I’ve been having similar pains at 4 1/2 months post op and am wondering if something like that wouldn’t be helpful... I don’t want to add paracetamol to my...

Hey Jamison, how ya been doing? Hope your recovery is going easier.

Couple more non-pharmaceutical ideas, though that rain on a tent is brilliant. 1. go over your whole day in your mind, what you all did. Before you reach the present moment you should be asleep. 2. Without manipulating them, count your breaths, in — out — 1..... in — out — 2.... and by 10 you...

Tell me about your infection experience! It’s been over a week since stopping Cephalexin and I’ve been waiting and hoping and so far the incision/wound hasn’t opened again, thank goodness, despite a small scab having formed over where it had opened before. I managed to get an appointment with...

In my experience, & from what I’ve read of others’ experience here, it seems CC likes to keep people who’ll be on warfarin, even if they feel ready to leave, for an extra day or two or three, till they’re in their INR range, often with a heparin drip. **** I was glad I had the recliner, though...

Thanks, Chuck & Tom. So it is 3 1/2 months post-op, and 2 weeks on antibiotics for what a thoracic surgeon said is a superficial sternal wound infection; but he also said he suspects two of the sternal wires are infected, which sounds to me like maybe something different?... I feel...

How it was for me - I woke up, eyes closed, tried to take a breath and couldn’t; tried again and couldn’t; had about one second of panic/desperation - and then my body seemed to decide it would be better to go back to sleep than to live in the kind of stressful world where it’s a struggle just...

Just want to say that the onset of symptoms can be so gradual, you might not even be aware of it. I was also able to walk three miles a day pre-op, and thought I was in good shape. After the surgery I realized I hadn’t been walking as briskly as I thought, and the hills had really been getting...

I found this: https://www.woundsme.com/uploads/resources/content_9823.pdf

Wow, look at this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24851729/ Too late...

Well, he took one look at it (over zoom) and said it’s infected. As if this wasn’t bad enough, his next sentence was that it was infected because of the sternal wire, and I need surgery to remove one or two of them. When I questioned him he admitted oral antibiotics could possibly heal it...

Thanks. I wonder how much platelet-rich plasma increases your INR? Or maybe that’s the least of one’s worries when you have an open incision as bad as those patients’... if I could just get a straight answer on what to do to heal it - whether to cover it or not, and if so, what kind of...

Now if only someone could come up with a way to make dissolvable sternal wires..

Very sneaky, Mister James... I like it.

More like won’t. Apparently it’s a liability issue, and since most PCPs/GPS have no idea about warfarin (yet resist being told they don’t need to do anything - that they can just give you the prescription - since one self-manages) they often refuse, referring you to the ‘Coumadin clinic’ or...

I have yet to come across such a person in Arkansas, but how great if that were the case and such a one could be found! Everyone I’ve seen so far wants to stick their dirty fingers in it (till I pull away at the last second and say ‘don’t touch it!’) so I’m v-e-r-y hesitant to go to yet another...