Aortic valve replacement

I must have been medicated. My throat hurt after they took the tube out, but nothing terrible or i think i would remember it.

If you cut yourself do you
Bleed a lot, how many times a day do you take blood thinners? Did they open up your whole sternum? If they did, the wire they use to hold your sternum in place to heal do they go back in and take them out?

I had the same fears, but i went back and could do 95% of what i was doing. Biking, running, etc.

How long were you in the hospital?

Not a lot of problems with bleeding. I sometimes think that I may not even need blood thinners, that there is so much velocity across the valve, that clots may not even form. But I don't want to be the test case for that.

I take thinners once per day, at bedtime. I test INR usually once per month. Finger poke usually.

Wires are still there.

Blood thinners are problematic if you need other stuff done that depends on them. If you have other surgeries, and I have needed a couple, you have to plan for it. They would like you to be completely off of them. So you do the dance of cutting way back on the thinners, filling in with injections of Lovenox or whatever that stuff is. That's a little frightening for obvious reasons.

So they will open up my sternum 😔 do you have any side effects? How long were you in the hospital? How long were you in pain? How did you manage to be on a breathing machine and not freak out for 24 hours?

I might need hernia surgery on my stomach at some point.

There has got to be a way to make it all work without thinners, and they have likely tried to, but obviously not been successful yet.

Are you still worried?