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There are videos at the Cleveland clinic website. I'd imagine it is quick, they have to use a very sharp tool to get a clean cut.
 
sternum_saw.jpg

This a sternum saw....it has a spinning cutter on the end.
 
Before surgery I didn't want the details of the surgery and after I read the surgeons report on my surgery I'm glad I didn't. But I did watch the part of the video when they are actually working on the valve.
 
I was okay with the scars and some detail but I didn't want to know how they stopped my heart or how the heart lung machine worked. No thanks.
 
My first OHS was am emergency and I had knew absolutely nothing about the actual surgery. I wasn't well enough to listen to long explanations and was so medicated I really wasn't all the interested at the time. After my surgery, I had a great need to learn all that I had experienced and this site along with another which is now off the web were invaluable to me.

When it came time for my second OHS, again, I needed to learn all I could.
 
I have a vivid imagination and really don't want to see any of these videos. After looking at Bina's photo of the sternum saw I get a strange wrigly feeling on my sternum scar!
I am interested in the technical details of this marvelous operation but I do not want to see how it is performed. There is one sentence in my surgeon's report "and the patient's heart arrested beautifully" which convinced me that I really do not want to see it in a video...
 
I just can't watch them cut skin open, skin is the only thing human about the whole video to me. But I am grossed out by all of it, after having my sternum cut open I can't eat ribs or steak on the bone. No thank you.
 
You can find these videos all over the internet. It doesn't bother me at all to watch them. In fact, I just watched the one for my particular type of valve replacement over again day before yesterday. Weird, I know!
 
I just can't watch them cut skin open, skin is the only thing human about the whole video to me. But I am grossed out by all of it, after having my sternum cut open I can't eat ribs or steak on the bone. No thank you.

Same here; don't show me skin being cut and don't show me broken bones.
The actual videos of heart surgery are now quite interesting to me though since I am post op.
 
I have a little different outlook. Once I knew surgery was imminent, I had to find out as many of the details as possible. So far the best video I've found was made at Texas Heart Institute. Here is a link to this hour long video.

http://www.or-live.com/texasheart/1326/event/rnh.cfm

You will find that it is of course carefully edited. You do hear the sternum saw but they do not show it in the view.

I found watching this video very reassuring. You get at least a little feel for how skilled these surgeons are and the care they take to insure their patients have a good outcome. One of the first things you notice is that there is very little blood loss. I banked blood for my own surgery but it was never used because my surgeon only measured 6 ounces of blood loss. This in itself is pretty incredible and indicates how far this type of surgery has come since the first one 50 years ago.

I certainly understand that some of us are troubled by these scenes and feel that their preference should be respected. Some of us, however, just need to know what will happen and how things get done. When my 5 year old niece learned that I was to have surgery to fix my heart, she paused for awhile and then came back in and asked "But how will he get inside?" She is of course my kindred spirit. I told her only that the Doctor would make an incision but that it would not hurt because I would be asleep. Later, she was the first person to ask if she could see the scar and when she did said she thought it looked nice and didn't look nearly as bad as her scraped knee.

There are still surprises. Most of us are not surgeons or nurses and just don't know the questions to ask. Somehow I failed to note that the drainage tubes and wires would each have their own little incision so I was somewhat surprised to find more holes than I expected. There are lots of bits of information available if you want to look for them.

Larry
 
I didn't want to know the details because the human brain has a way of dwelling on that stuff; others may simply find it interesting. I am glad I was clueless. My wife watches lots of videos on c-sections before she had one; it messed with her and added additional stress.
 
I have a little different outlook. Once I knew surgery was imminent, I had to find out as many of the details as possible. So far the best video I've found was made at Texas Heart Institute. Here is a link to this hour long video.

http://www.or-live.com/texasheart/1326/event/rnh.cfm

You will find that it is of course carefully edited. You do hear the sternum saw but they do not show it in the view.

I found watching this video very reassuring. You get at least a little feel for how skilled these surgeons are and the care they take to insure their patients have a good outcome. One of the first things you notice is that there is very little blood loss. I banked blood for my own surgery but it was never used because my surgeon only measured 6 ounces of blood loss. This in itself is pretty incredible and indicates how far this type of surgery has come since the first one 50 years ago.

I certainly understand that some of us are troubled by these scenes and feel that their preference should be respected. Some of us, however, just need to know what will happen and how things get done. When my 5 year old niece learned that I was to have surgery to fix my heart, she paused for awhile and then came back in and asked "But how will he get inside?" She is of course my kindred spirit. I told her only that the Doctor would make an incision but that it would not hurt because I would be asleep. Later, she was the first person to ask if she could see the scar and when she did said she thought it looked nice and didn't look nearly as bad as her scraped knee.

There are still surprises. Most of us are not surgeons or nurses and just don't know the questions to ask. Somehow I failed to note that the drainage tubes and wires would each have their own little incision so I was somewhat surprised to find more holes than I expected. There are lots of bits of information available if you want to look for them.

Larry

Well Said Larry. And like you, I wanted to know as many details as possible. It helped me going into it understanding what would be done to me the same way it helped me from the time I first awoke in the cardiac recovery unit as I better understood what I was feeling and what to expect. I remember being barely concsious but asking the nurse taking care of me how much I could expand my chest and lungs so I could immediately work toward independent breathing. For me, the more I knew, the more I could work on what was in my control to facilitate the process of healing and recovering. But that's not to say the idea of my sternum being sawed open doesn't make me cringe.
 
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