Waiting for the Shoe to Drop

Monday, September 28 dad went in for his CAT scan. I wasn't around, but by all reports it was uneventful. We waited on tenterhooks all afternoon for results because at that point we didn't really know the size of the aneurysm, nor its exact location. Anything above the renal arteries is more complicated, and anything under 5.5cm might just be a "wait and see" kind of thing.

No news.

Tuesday we're still waiting on tenterhooks. Finally, in the afternoon dad unearths a piece of paper that says "We'll call you with results 48 hours after your CAT scan. After some good natured ribbing from me and serious kvetching from mom, we attempt to relax and wait for Wednesday.

Wednesday, just as I'm walking in to the local store with Zac to buy him some clothes, my cell phone rings. I had been at pains to make sure that I could participate in the conversation my parents had with the surgeon and he called while he was talking to them.

That is when we learned all the particulars about the aneurysm (6cm infra-renal), and when the surgeon let us know his preference for a procedure: a stent. The Wikipedia article is brief, but gives you the idea: you thread a hose liner up into the widened part of the artery to relieve the pressure on the (presumably) weakened arterial walls. Relieved of pressure, they then settle back around the "liner" (stent) and all is well.

The slight complication, which I'm still trying to understand, involves the fact that, due to an insufficient "landing zone" at the bottom end of the stent, the surgeon expects that he will be unable to supply blood to both iliac arteries. He needs an 18mm margin at the top and bottom, and has only 17mm at the bottom. I have no idea what the tolerances are here, but he clearly doesn't believe that he'll get what he needs.

So the plan is to do a bypass from below the end of the stent to the other (right, I think) iliac artery. I don't understand why that's preferable to one of the bifurcated stents illustrated in the wikimedia commons picture.

So at that point, the major piece of work-up remaining before the surgery was a cardiac stress test, scheduled for Monday, Oct 5th. Surgery was scheduled for Monday, Oct 12.