Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm Stent Graft Athlete One
of the things about working at Angioplasty.Org that warms my heart
(pun intended) is connecting with patients around the world. Our Patient
Forum gets posts from the U.S., U.K., Pakistan, Poland, India,
Iran, China, Chile and...North Carolina. That's where Kevin Morgan
lives and
where
he publishes his new blog, athletewithstent.com.
All too often, our Forum serves as a kind of complaint
department -- where patients write in about problems they are
having after
stents, angioplasty, angiograms, etc. They usually find our Forum
through search engines like Google (e.g. look up "Stents
Plavix Aspirin"). And these posts are important because on our
Forum people can share stories and discover they are not alone.
But Kevin isn't having problems. In fact, he writes that
he feels "so
lucky to be alive" and he wants to find other AAA stent graft athletes
to create a community on his blog. So to help him we opened
a new topic on our
Forum, "Living
and Training with an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) Stent Graft".
Turns out Kevin has been an "IronMan" competitor
for years -- that's him in the photo above, in the summer of 2010,
just two weeks before
he discovered an aneurysm in his aorta. He had suspected something was wrong
and, when this was confirmed by his cardiologist, he was told it
was 7cm and was given a 50% chance of survival by the end of the
year, unless the aneurysm was treated. So a stent graft was placed in his
aorta.
The treatment for this type of aneurysm used to require
opening the abdomen, excising the aneurysm and surgically
repairing the aorta by sewing in a graft -- very invasive open
surgery. But in the 1990's an alternative procedure was invented
by Dr. Juan Parodi -- using techniques similar
to angioplasty, a stent graft was threaded through an opening
in the femoral or iliac artery, into the aorta
and expanded: no open surgery needed.
In the short 6 minute video
clip below, Dr. Parodi and colleagues tell the story of the first
endovascular AAA repair (from Angioplasty.Org's
documentary, "Vascular
Pioneers: Evolution of a Specialty" -- you can buy
the DVD online.):
In the early days, the endovascular stent devices were
less sophisticated than they are now, and this less invasive
repair was used very cautiously, reserved for patients too sick
for surgery, patients so weak that they probably would not survive
an open procedure.
But now we have Kevin, a 67-year-old IronMan
Athlete with an aortic stent graft -- and he's blogging! And...he's
moving back into IronMan training, swimming, running, and biking.
And...he's looking for patients to share stories and training ideas
with. Check
out his blog at athletewithstent.com.