27th December 2021

Falling In Love With a Grand Old Lady

Four years ago today my heart had stopped and I was not breathing. A machine took the blood from my body and oxygenated it before pumping it back in to keep my brain and other organs alive. My lungs were collapsed as they sawed through my breastbone to expose the chest cavity.

This was an operation at Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire to replace my aortic heart valve with a new one made from bovine pericardium preserved with glutaraldehyde. If it had gone badly, my last memory would have been of watching fluffy falling snow through a window onto a dark morning but the team were incredible and it went well. I saw the next years’ snowdrops and plan to see many more springs come around.

I’d been born with the wrong type of valve, apparently. By now I was pushing blood though a hole less than a millimetre across where it should have been about 3 centimetres. If it hadn't been found and fixed it is likely that my lifespan would have been measured in weeks. So, they made me a new one from a cow – not a whole cow, obviously, just part of one.

It’s really mindbogglingly amazing that they can do that and, four years later, I can write about it. Medical science is full of wonders and this is truly one of the most wondrous, at least from my personal point of view.

There are several choices when it comes to getting a new heart valve. The first, of course, is to refuse the offer but as it was clear that if I did this I wouldn’t be around long enough to finish even a moderately small jigsaw, I decided against this option. So, having decided to go along with the doctors’ plans, I had to choose a type. It was recommended, as I was fairly young, that I should have a mechanical valve made of carbon and titanium as that would probably outlast me. Unfortunately, this also involved taking drugs for the rest of my life and I didn’t feel that I wanted that.

So, I chose a bioprosthetic valve. They can give you a new valve from a pig or manufacture a valve from the sac that surrounds a cow’s heart. If you have the pig valve it is literally that, a valve from a pig’s heart. We are so similar that it’s more or less a straight swap. Mind you, if you’ve ever looked into a pig’s eyes, you’ll know that there’s not a lot separating us. I don’t mean lovingly gaze into their eyes, by the way, it’s my heart that’s broken, not my brain - at least not in a way that the medical profession have diagnosed.

If you have a valve made from cow, then the process is far more complicated but I had read that: “Prior to implant, cow valve replacements undergo rigorous quality testing to ensure the valve is durable enough to be used in surgery”, so that was re-assuring, eh? Like they wouldn’t bother, like they’d just knock one up in their lunch break and say: “That’ll probably do.”

The major drawback, I was told, was that I could only plan on it lasting ten years but that doesn’t mean I can’t hope it will last twenty. I now have a 25 mm Carpentier-Edwards PERIMOUNT Magna Ease Bovine Aortic Heart Valve. I’m not sure if they're chasing TrustPilot reviews but it would be five stars from me. Mainly on the grounds that I’m not dead.

A 25 mm Carpentier-Edwards PERIMOUNT Magna Ease Bovine Aortic Heart Valve

So, here I am, forty percent of the way through the warranty on that valve and determined to live every single day to the very best of my ability. I have had a great passion in my life for forty years now and today is a very special day because I have fallen in love with a grand old lady.