Member Profiles
Dan Walter
topic: Pulmonary Vein Ablation
I wouldn't send my dog to Johns Hopkins.
My experience at Johns Hopkins Baltimore:
I took my wife there last year for a Pulmonary Vein Ablation to treat her
arryhtmia. The procedure involves manuevering a catheter through a vein and up
inside the heart chamber.
While the tip of the catheter was inside her heart, the doctor turned away
momentarily and the tip of the catheter got caught in the muscles of her mitral
valve. Another doctor was called in to help. He pulled on the catheter and
severed her mitral valve muscles. Open-heart surgery was performed to replace
the valve.
In recovery, she was taken off the ventilator prematurely, resulting in Acute
Congestive Heart Failure and had to be put back on life support. She ran a
fever, had a stroke and went into a coma. She spent three weeks in the ICU.
During that time, she suffered eye damage because her eyes were not lubricated
or covered - despite suggestions from family - at a time when she had no blink
reflex. The result was scratched corneas from a syndrome called Exposure
Keratopathy, something the eye experts at the Wilmer Institute
later shrugged off as being something they "see a
lot of" in the ICU. She now has nerve damage in her right hand from either the
stroke or improper bed restraint methods.
I firmly believe that if her family were not there to insist on proper care,
that she would be either dead or the next thing to it in some long-term nursing
facility. As it is, she has loss of equilibrium, short-term memory deficits and
general cognitive problems.
Before her stay at Hopkins, she was a relatively healthy Registered Nurse and
entrepreneur who ran two businesses. Post-Hopkins she can neither run a busines
nor practice nursing and has been officially classified as being disabled by the
Social Security Administration.
Still has Atrial Fibrilation.
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