Clark Howard out of surgery, ‘procedure went perfectly’

Clark Howard underwent surgery to replace a valve in his heart on Wednesday morning, and the procedure “went perfectly” according to his wife, Lane.

Howard has had a defective aortic valve since he was a teenager that has deteriorated over time. Though the rest of his heart is healthy, a buildup of calcium on his aortic valve has not been allowing blood to get to the rest of his body the way it should, leaving him tired and short of breath.

“So, unlike a heart attack where it can acutely come up, valvular disease is really a slow process because it takes years for the calcium to build up on those aortic valve leaflets. And as it does that, the symptoms creep up on you slowly,” said Piedmont Health cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Vinod Thourani.

Thourani and Howard’s team of doctors at Piedmont decided he was a candidate for something called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, which means instead of opening up his chest, his surgeon would go in through an artery in his groin to install a replacement cow valve.

An existing version of this procedure was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2011, but this new version has not yet been approved.

“They need guinea pigs,” Howard told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I signed up to be a guinea pig. If it works, I’ll have a fully functioning aortic valve.”

What Howard is getting isn’t a full cow valve, he said. “It’s part metal, part fabric, part cow,” he noted. “It’s a really crazy looking thing.”

“When we do fix his valve, he’ll have instantaneous relief literally overnight. You can tell that you can breathe better. You are able to walk faster, you’re able to go up the stairs again,” Thourani said.

After the procedure on Wednesday, Lane said that Clark’s nice new Sapien X4 valve is pumping away.

She also noted, “I hear he was chatty even as he was under during the procedure. No surprise there. Probably asking the doctors if they had gotten a travel deal lately”.