Clifford's Profile

Hi, I'm Frances, Cliff's wife and I'm the one that found this site last month after Cliff's cardiologist said the time had come for him to have an aortic valve replacement. He was born with a bicuspid aortic valve that had slowly calcified over the past few years. For the past 30 years, all our medical needs were taken cared of at Stanford Healthcare, so we were referred to a cardiothoracic surgeon there, but the appointment would be four weeks away. In the meantime, I read as much material as I could and determined that it would be helpful to arrange for a second opinion. Thanks to this site, I learned about Dr. Luis Castro and he was only a few miles away from Stanford. As it turned out, we were able to get an appointment with him a week before the appointment with the Stanford surgeon and, in hindsight, I'm so happy that it happened that way. When we met with Dr. Castro, he was very personable and very knowledgeable. We each had a list of questions including those suggested by Adam on this website. He answered all of them in a way that we could understand and we left the office feeling very hopeful. This week, we met with the Stanford surgeon. I'm sure he is also very skilled and knowledgeable as he told us he has and still performs two to three heart valve surgeries a week for 16 years so far. The biggest difference was that Dr. Castro was fully supportive of and capable of performing a hemi sternotomy while the other surgeon insisted that a median sternotomy was the only option. If everything else is equal then this, alone, would be more than enough to be the tiebreaker. So, we have scheduled the surgery for August 29th and are now preparing ourselves mentally, emotionally, and, in my husband's case, physically for that event. This website has been godsend and reading other people's stories has been very encouraging.