Cardiac Surgery

For my first two weeks of rotation in Nagoya, I worked in Cardiac surgery dept. I mainly worked with two main surgeons, Dr Usui and Dr Ueda. Both spoke good English, and they were extremely nice to me. They were really interested in my experiences in the US as a med student. As far as the cases go, I was lucky enough that every day during the two weeks there is a different operative case every day. They range from CABG (coronary artery bypass graft), valve replacement, aortic dissection, and thoracic aortic aneurysm repair. Unlike my two weeks of CT surgery in the US, where most cases were just CABG, it’s really an equal mixture of aortic arch/artery repair and CABG. I found aortic repair much more interesting (but also more challenging) than CABG. It definitely requires fine operative skills from a cardiac surgeon. There was one case where the entire surgery went for 19 hrs (!!) until 5am the next day because the whole descending thoracic aorta was reconstructed. Fortunately, they let me go home early at 4pm in the afternoon J