• Question: Will you be safe if someone operates on your heart ?

    Asked by Gajanan to Jimi on 16 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Jimi Wills

      Jimi Wills answered on 16 Mar 2016:

      Surgery and medicine are all about balancing risk… that means you have to decide whether it’s safer to operate, or safer not to.

      There is always a risk with surgery… the main things are if people have a reaction to the anaestetic, have a bleed during surgery or get an infection afterwards. All these things can be dealt with, and they are not very likely in the first place.

      Normally people have heart surgery because they are at risk of death from a heart attack. In this case, it is always safer to have the surgery than to not have it.

      There are different types of heart surgery – open heart surgery or keyhole surgery… it depends what needs to be done… people with blocked coronary arteries can have them stented (held open with a tube) which can be done keyhole, or they can have a bypass, where those arteries are replaced by new ones (usually removed from the person’s leg) and this requires open surgery.

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