Holey Moley

Well, not exactly rocket science, but last weekend I admitted a patient who I found incidentally had critical aortic stenosis (a life threatening narrowing of the aortic valve; that’s not what they had come in for (their gallbladder) but I actually listened to her heart with my stethoscope, and heard the harsh murmur and got an echocardiogram.

I tried to explain how critically tight the valve was and that we would need to replace the valve (traditionally that required open heart surgery [where we “kill you” put you on bypass pump and then “unkill you”, but now we can do it via “TAVR” which is a cool origami like valve that gets deployed via a catheter and pops into shape while the patient is awake - day procedure). But the patient and family couldn’t understand what 0.3 square cm of area meant. So, I thought, hey, I have a laser. And so quickly made a CAD file (since OnShape has a scripting language) of every size from 03.0 down to 0.4 square cm (essentially a pasta sizer).