Chapters Transcript Video Triple Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Recovery My name's Elliott Landman. I'm 68 years old. Myself and Nora have been together for 27 years, you know, we play through life. I was going for a back ablation, and they said you have to have a cardiac checkup. So the cardiac checkup, he says after we did the angiogram that I am not a candidate for more stents. I have 4. So he says you gotta go for open heart. I first met Mr. Landman after he was referred to my office by his cardiologist who had evaluated him for significant coronary artery disease. Coronary artery disease is blockages in the in the arteries that provide blood flow. To the heart muscle, coronary artery disease is the most common problem that we see in humans as they age. It's exacerbated though by smoking, poor diet, inactivity, not exercising, uncontrolled hypertension, and diabetes. If your family has coronary artery disease in its history, there's a high likelihood that you'll have the same. I met Doctor Taylor. He was so warm, friendly, took his time, explained what was going to happen. Went through all the details, just immediately felt super comfortable with him. Mr. Landman had a positive family history both on his mother and his father's side for coronary artery disease. Heart disease is a silent killer because I know what I went through as a child from 10 to 18 until my father passed, and my brother had the same thing, but he's had a heart attack and so I had to get to a point where I was healthy. In general, people who have coronary artery disease will have chest pain or chest tightness that then will radiate to their arm or to their jaw. That's the classic symptom. But for many people, they don't experience that. In particular, women may not have the classic symptoms. The silly part is I didn't have any symptoms. The operation we did for him was coronary bypass grafting times 3. The heart basically has 3 major arteries that go to the heart, 1 to the right side, 2 to the left, and if Critical blockage in each of those, we reconstruct the blood flow to the heart. There are two arteries on the inside of our chest. Both of those can be taken down off the chest wall and then reconstructed to provide blood flow. We also can oftentimes take vein from the leg or we can take an artery from somebody's wrist. We follow all of our patients for a minimum of 1 night in the ICU to make sure that they're safe. We want our patients to be independent by the time they go home so they can manage themselves and so bridging them with rehab is really a constructive way of helping them get back on their feet and becoming independent. So at Baptist we have the advantage of having two rehab institutes that we work with. The first is an inpatient called Thornell Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine. There's actually an automobile they can practice driving, getting in and out of a car, things that are daily living activities. They set me up with an ET who was making sure I was able to do my daily functions. The second is the Gloria Drummond Physical Rehabilitation Institute. Now it's time for me to get well in a physical sense, not just from the operation. So they put me on different machines, and I've been doing that ever since. I had the operation 3 months ago. Everything was so well. Organized that I was able to go back to work in 3 weeks. What makes Baptist Health so specially equipped to take care of advanced problems like this is the fact that we use multidisciplinary teams to solve these patients' problems. So you're not just seeing one individual or one provider, you're seeing a team of people in almost a tailored approach. The way they've created their environment is amazing. They actually take that personalized care. Created by
