Today was a more low-key day. We started at around 8:30am by looking at some crazy x-rays from a patient who had fidgeted with their pacemaker (which lies under the skin underneath the collarbone) and caused the wires, which were attached to the heart in specific locations, to become coiled up and removed from their original positions. This can be very bad, especially if the patient is relying on this device to keep their heart beating. After looking at these x-rays, we watched 4 very quick procedures in the cath lab. The cath lab is where minimally invasive procedures are done with catheters. The first procedure was placing a micra pacemaker in a patient. A picture of this pacemaker can be seen in the post from day 1 (it is the very small device next to the larger one). The second procedure was called a linq. It is a 10 minute procedure in which the patient is awake the entire time. This particular patient was young and had a stroke. The doctors didn’t know why, so they completed this procedure which inserts a small device right under the skin and detects when the heart is having irregular rhythms. It then sends data to the doctor to look at in the morning. The third procedure was replacing the battery in a pacemaker that a patient had. The batteries themselves cannot be replaced, the entire pacemaker has to be replaced for a new battery. In this surgery the leads were unscrewed from the old pacemaker and screwed into a new pacemaker with the new battery. The next procedure was similar to the first procedure we saw on day 1, where a regular pacemaker with wires/leads were placed into a patient. After this 4th surgery, we took a quick lunch break then watched our final surgery of the day which was seeing if a patient needed a stent or bypass surgery. To do this, the patient is lightly sedated and a catheter is brought into the heart through an artery in the arm. Contrast is injected and x-rays are used to see where the blockages are. The picture below is an example of what a blocked artery looks like. This picture is from the internet and not from the actual patient we saw.
After this procedure we called it a day at around 2pm after having two back to back long work days (as high school students).