Chapters Transcript Video Back on the Golf Course in Three Weeks After Minimally Invasive Bypass Surgery I'm John Zells, retired banker. I'm from Massachusetts. My wife is from, uh, upstate New York. I'm 76 years old and, um, a very happy patient of a, uh, minimally invasive bypass surgery. My wife and I travel extensively. We're gone at least 3 months out of every year. We've been to Europe countless times, just about every country. Golf is not only the athletic part, it's the social part of my life that I enjoy so much. I went for an annual physical and I mentioned to my doctor at the time that I seemed to have some acid reflux, so I went to my cardiologist and I mentioned the same thing to him. The more he asked me questions, the more he said, you know, let's do a catheterization. You go into the hospital and then they're able to take a look at all of the arteries in the heart. I woke up and he's standing there and he goes, you have a 90+% blockage in your widowmaker. He sent me to a cardiac surgeon at Boca Raton Regional Hospital. I'm Doctor JT McGinn the 3rd. I am a cardiac surgeon at Baptist Health Heart and Vascular Care, and I specialize in minimally invasive cardiac surgery. Mr. Zells approached me with some ambiguous symptoms. He did say that he did have some reflux. That's actually very common to have reflux, and it's also very common to mistake cardiac pain for reflux, but he did get a cath, uh, that was a follow-up, I believe, from a calcium score that he had gotten that was pretty high. The catheterization showed that he had severe two vessel disease of his coronaries. It was recommended that he undergo a bypass surgery. I, along with maybe a handful of other surgeons around the world, can do multi-vessel revascularization through a minimally invasive incision. It's a technique that was taught to me by my father, and we basically go in through a mini thoracotomy on the left side. We spread the ribs. There's no breakage of bones, no breaking the, the breast bone, and we do the, the same procedure with the same risk and the same outcomes through that incision. Doctor McGinn said that the nature of the blockage I had, the location that I was an excellent candidate for the procedure, I had no pain, no discomfort, and 3 weeks to the day following surgery, I was on a golf course playing golf. He's an avid golfer and he's very active, and he would be missing a whole season of golf if he had gotten the surgery conventionally at that time. I've performed over 300 of these procedures at Baptist, and I've treated a lot of patients like Mr. Zells. They were just living their lives normally up until they were told they have this ticking time bomb because these symptoms are very nebulous, ambiguous, and, and often silent. You know, in a patient who has any sort of question or any risk for cardiovascular disease, they should definitely pursue further intervention to see if there's anything going on. Without reservation, I would recommend to my family and friends and anyone that asks Baptist Health, heart and vascular care as an exceptional solution, uh, for. My type of problem Created by
