My father is having bypass surgery on his leg this week. From what I’ve been told, he had an angiography procedure a few weeks ago, but the doctor said the blockage was too calcified to break and insert a stent.
My question is this - why does he need a bypass? Can’t the doctors just snip out the area with the blockage and then sew the two ends of the artery together?
(If I lived in the area I would ask the doctor myself, but we’re separated by 6 thousand miles.)
IANAD, but even if the affected area was small and the arteries could stretch that far, you’d now have a sutured together artery with the join under great stress, which I suspect could easily leak or rip. And that’s under the “best” of conditions.
How long is the blockage? Often in this type of situation, it is not a simple, short stenosis. Instead, the blockage affects a relatively long portion of the artery. In such a situation, you can’t simply remove say, eight inches of artery, and then join the two loose ends together - you just can’t pull the two pieces of artery together that much. OTOH, for short blockages, sure, you may be able to find enough slack in the two loose ends to pull them together.