Hi, my name is Tom Albers and I am
a 34 year old Caucasian male. I'm from a small town in
Kansas. In fact I'm only about 70 miles away from good
old Dodge City. Anyway, I teach advanced math and coach
football and basketball. I had AVR surgery on 3-14-00
and was married on 6-17-00. Two days later I became a
dad even though it wasn't planned. My wife has two
children whom I'm planning on adopting. They
are 6 and 4 years old. My story is one that is very
strange in that if i tried I couldn't get this to happen
again. Back in 1994 I was coaching a football practice
when one of my players cleated me accidentally in the leg.
Two days later I began having leg pains in the middle of the
night, so severe I couldn't sleep. I went to the doctor
and I was diagnosed with a blood clot. I was put on
blood thinners and heparin and sent home. There was a
mix up with which doctor was to monitor me and I ended up
taking way to much coumadin, my protime was at 17 when I went
into the doctor's office. Well, being the type of person
that I am I had started to feel better so I began trying to
recover by doing light exercises and leg lifts. To make
this very long story shorter, I somehow broke a blood vessel
in my calf and blood began to leak into my calf muscle forming
a hematoma. I then started spiking fevers and having
night sweats, so, 7 days later I was hospitalized and had
surgery on my leg. Somehow, someway I contacted a staph
infection that became septic in my blood. I was put on 6
weeks of 4 IV antibiotic treatments a day. Five days
after my first leg surgery I threw up and threw up so hard my
artery in my leg blew open again and back to the surgical
center I went. I spent 19 days in the hospital and saw
every type of specialist I could. They never really
figured out what caused it all to happen or why but I was
deemed cured. Of course, I missed 45 days of work,
inherited reflexive sympathetic dystrophy, and went from
198lbs to 171 lbs in about 3 weeks. Alas everything was
fine and dandy until a doctor's appointment in 97. There
it was discovered that I had a heart murmur during a check up.
After and echo cardio gram it was discovered I had aortic
regurgitation. After consulting with several doctors and
surgeons and researching through the wonderful people on this
site, I had surgery on March 14, 2000. After some
internal tests, they discovered that I had an aneurysm
underneath my aorta and I needed surgery right away. My
surgeon was Dr. Mike Gorton from the Mid America Heart
Institute at St. Lukes in Kansas City Missouri. He is
only 40 and yet had performed many AVR's, both mechanical and
tissue. He also has performed heart transplants, and
bypasses galore. He's a very gifted, wonderful person
whom I owe my life to. He listened to every question
looked at my lifestyle and my particular problem and told me
that a homograft would be the best way to go for me. So
I took his advice and went with it. He gave me lots of
statistics on the latest research on homografts vs coumadin,
and stats on repeat surgery's and anything else he could think
of giving. My surgery lasted about 3 hours after he
patched and repaired the hole in my heart next to the
aneurysm. I went in at 9 am and woke up early the next
morning. It was here that the doctors determined that my
problem was caused from my staph infection. I
didn't feel any pain and the catheter (sp) wasn't as bad as I
thought it might be. I had a rough 2nd day as man was I
sore, but for the most part it was much better than I ever
thought it could have been. When I got back home 5 days
later, my dad passed away my first night back. That
stress coupled with trying to recover to fast to soon, led me
to get an infection in my incision. That set me back
about four weeks as the surgeon had to press on my chest to
get all of the pus out of the incision. That caused my
breastbone to reset and I had to wait another 5 weeks for it
to finally heal. I was allowed to drive after 12
days and that helped me not be so dependent. My recovery
went great from there as in my 8 th week post op I was walking
at least 3 miles a day and jogging one of those miles.
Since then I have continued to exercise but afraid to lift
weights yet. I'm due for my first year anniversary check
up in May and looking forward to the clean bill of health.
God bless each and every one of you and may you have continued
health and hapiness.
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