I guess having ice water for blood is bad for one's vascular health!
Today, Vice President Dick Cheney, the man a heartbeat from the Oval Office, had repair work done on arteries behind both knees.
It was earlier reported that Cheney would have an aneurysm behind one knee, his right, repaired today with another surgery to be scheduled to remove the aneurysm behind his left knee at a later date.
According to the
NY Times -
The change in plans was "an intraoperative decision," Mr. Schmidt said, meaning that the doctors made the decision to also do the left knee suddenly, in the operating room.
Cheney was under the knife for about 6 hours which was, according to two vascular surgeons quoted in the article linked above, about twice as long as usual.
Dr. K. Craig Kent, chief of vascular surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, said he knew all of the doctors who were involved in the procedure well and that they were medically conservative. Dr. Kent said he would not have done both knee aneurysm repairs on the same day, but assumed the team had "compelling reasons" to do so.
Sounds like Cheney's circulatory system is not optimum Presidential material.
Dr. Thomas R. Bernik, chief of endovascular surgery at St. Vincent's Manhattan Hospital, had this to say to the NY Times -
"You really never want to tackle both sides at once because even though things may go smoothly on one side, you can still run into a problem while you are doing the other side, or shortly thereafter, and then you really could have a big problem on your hands."
If Cheney was a Democrat, the GOP would be screaming for the President to replace him with a man in good health.