4th Week at TCH

     Today I watched an operation on a young boy who has been in heart failure, and already had an artificial heart device put in during a previous operation. There was a leak in a valve that they put in previously that they will probably have to fix on a later date, as well as a blood clot near the valve. Today though, they were mainly testing different speeds of the device to see which seemed the most natural and worked the best for him. They used both X-ray and ultrasound to do this, which was very interesting, because I did not know previously that ultrasound was used to look at your heart.