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FWIW, we've had a brief discussion here about the various formulas -- at least THREE of them, IIRC -- used to adjust valve areas to compensate for different body sizes. They all coincide around average sizes, but they produce very different results in the "tails" of the distribution -- i.e., for...

Lyn, I think your guess (about how to resolve the paradox I found counter-intuitive) makes sense. OTOH, wouldn't that explain the high rate of survival for those with severe HF, more than for those with mild (class 1 or 2) HF? One of the surprises in this last study is that the surgical group...

Lynlw and I had a back-and-forth about the benefits of (and the use of) an aggressive "shoot first and ask questions later" approach to treating Bacterial Endocarditis among tissue-valve recipients. At the end of it, I think we agreed to disagree about (1) how quickly Toronto General Hospital's...

I happened to mention (by e-mail) to a Rabbi I know that I was likely to get a replacement valve from a pig. She e-mailed me a clipping about (or maybe by?) an Orthodox Rabbi who got a pig valve and explained why it was not an issue at all. Basically, health/illness trumps all the other rules in...

Excellent -- maybe except for the knees! My legs have been getting tired from my exercycle workouts a bit before I complete the cardiac "prescription" -- though I've taken that more as good news about the heart, than bad news about the legs. At my age, it could certainly be either. . .

The obvious problem with the sample is that it didn't "interview" the non-survivors. Some of them may have died from (or with) Significant Valve Deterioration. So it's hard to draw any conclusions from that kind of a biased sample. (Maybe that was 335 surviving patients out of an original 345...

Last several weeks, when I've done my weekly gruelling 45-minute Exercycle workout in Cardio Rehab, pushing my HR up to ~140 then letting it settle to ~125, over and over and over, I've noticed that my legs were starting to get tired before I was finishing the Cardio prescription. My Cardio...

An OK system I worked out when I was taking Metoprolol 2x/d (no kids involved): I kept the pills in my pocket, always with me. I took a narrow strip of card stock and wrote "AM" on one top edge, and "PM" on another. The card was attached to the pill bottle with a rubber band or two. Every time...

I think I "went" more often at night post-op than pre-op, but that was mostly because I had trouble sleeping more than 2 or 3 hours at a stretch. "As long as I'm awake". . . Many of us had trouble sleeping 6-8 hours in a row post-op. That wouldn't explain peeing a lot during the daytime, of course.

LeakyUK, you might want to check out http://m.theheart.org/article/1309811.do?utm_campaign=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=20111122_AHA_topStories and maybe discuss it with your Doc re #4.

Offwego, of all the diagnoses in the WORLD I could apply to you from reading your posts, I think the LAST one would be ADD! You seem remarkably well focused for any recent OHS patient. Way to overcome!

Re: "He said I can do rehab if I want but that if I am active, considering I am in pretty good shape, he didn't think I really need it." I'm very active, but I've found C. Rehab very useful. For lots of patients, it' a way to be more active. Fro me, there was some of that, but it was mostly a...

The law of diminishing returns is in force here, but the law of the bottleneck -- "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link", or "a fluid's speed through a complex course is largely determined by the primary (tightest) bottleneck, not by the secondary and tertiary bottlenecks" -- is...

Sounds great, John, and not unlike my experience after my AVR (etc.) last Dec. The main difference is that I've never liked straight running, so I've mostly been doing cycling (road and exer-) and I've just recently returned to competitive volleyball. Another difference is that I've ditched all...

Mine has kind of reversed in the 11+ months post-op. I started with the big bump at the very top. But now the top ~60% of my incision is the smooth semi-invisible part, and it's the bottom part that's redder and more pronounced. Fortunately, that's the part that's most covered with chest hair...

I agree with chaconne. We share information among ourselves as if we were talking in private, "entre nous". But this whole forum is wide open to anybody on the Internet, so our secrets aren't secret at all. That openness probably does a lot of good -- by letting researchers and "lurkers" get...

Either choice can turn out to be easy or hard. Let me "third" Emu & Lyn's suggestion to compare the downsides, too. If things go smoothly, either way, you'll never be tempted to second-guess your decision. But if you (e.g.) choose mech and need a re-op anyway, or choose tissue and have to be on...

I went with tissue (at 65), but I was on daily warfarin for the first 3 months post-op. I didn't bother fighting for home testing (which generally makes it easier and better), but it still was no big deal. My cardiologist thought I was crazy to go downhill skiing while I was on ACT, but I did...

Welcome to "the family", Gina! FWIW, the normal (majority) Aortic Valve has 3 flaps or cusps, but ~1-2% of us is born with two of them fused together = "bicuspid", or BAV. Those BAVs tend to deteriorate more quickly than the more common TRIcuspid ones, and they deteriorate by calcium formation...

For most of us, the recovery is a sharp rise and a long "tail" -- what the mathematicians call "concave downward". The first few days (and weeks and months) present a lot of progress, barring "bumps in the road". But even after 6 months and even 9 months, I wasn't quite back to 100%. Now, at 11+...