Do you know how many times your heart beats in a lifetime? Well if you were seeing Dr. Bolling I think that may be his opening question.... and the answer is 3 billion! I don't think I will ever forget that.
On Monday we went to meet the 2nd surgeon - Dr. Steven Bolling. A little insight on Dr. Bolling:
- He performs 350-400 mitral valve repair surgeries a year (other surgeons only do about 4 repairs a year and mostly do replacements).
- He is 1 of 3 surgeons in the region that perform the large amount of mitral valve repairs.
- The oldest patient he has operated on was 100 years old and the youngest was a newborn.
- He has worked with Dr. Deeb for 26 years - thats longer than some marriages!
He was very impressive!! He was down to earth and one of the first doctors that didn't talk to us using the usual textbook terms or a long list of acronyms we weren't familiar with. He immediately drew a picture of Sam's heart and highlighted the problem valves and explained in depth what was going on and how he was going to fix it.
The week before our appointment with him I got an email from
Adam's Heart Valve Surgery Blog (I subscribed to this a few years ago and the articles are great). Dr. Bolling talks about the mitral valve predictably
here on Adam's Heart Blog. Its amazing how things happen at just the right time... it landed in my inbox and i happened to catch the name in the headline and immediately got goosebumps watching this small clip of him.
I was so happy that both Dr. Bolling and his physician assistant Dr. Michael Guerra were so patient and answered our long list of questions.
After our appointment we went to find the Med Inn hotel located inside of the hospital. I wanted to see where it was located in relation to the cardiovascular center and get the 411. Lucky for us the rooms were just renovated from the 80's two months ago and look almost like Marriott hotel rooms - not too bad for being hospital rooms transformed!
Surgery has been scheduled for the end of October... more details to come..
