Trouble with wires is not common.
Minimally invasive incisions often avoid cutting the sternum altogether.
when minimaly invasive surgery is employed... how much of the sternum is left attached.. half? a third? and is that enough that wires are not needed at all?
I have heard a lot of troubles with the wires... is it fairly common?
Is placement of wires a routine practice in open heart surgery? Do they stay in indefinitely, or are they usually removed? When?
If the sternum (breastbone) is cut open, wires are used to close it and help it heal. These wires stay in permanently, unless there are problems with infection or severe pain.
Fracture of the wires is a possibility. However, this is often seen on x-ray on patients who have had certain cardiac incisions, but in some cases does not produce symptoms.
Hi -- your description of your husband's pain sounds very much like my experience, when at nine weeks post op from mitral repair, I did indeed fracture two sets of the wires. They were removed a few weeks later, after trying some anti-inflammatories which helped a bit but not enough.
But, if the minimally invasive procedure was used, were wires even put in? My surgery started as minimally invasive and was converted to a median sternotomy when an additional problem showed up, and my minimally invasive incision has no wires underneath.
Anyway, ultimately all of my wires were removed, (the last three sets at nearly 6 months post op), because they all hurt with different kinds of motion. One particular pain only showed up after skating, and I generally spend 10-12 hours a week figure skating! So I had that pain a lot. Another set only hurt in the morning after I'd slept on my side. They all hurt after I'd had to drive for more than 15 or 20 minutes.
I think my wire pain is relatively uncommon, but if your husband has recently increased his physical work-outs or changed them, it makes sense to me that the wires could be either damaged or hurting him.
Just my two cents.
Shannon
The surgical incision can sometimes be associated with the problems that you describe. Typically, these problems occur in the months after surgery, not several years later. I would recommend an evaluation by a cardiologist, to first determine whether there is any chance that the pain is cardiac. If it is not cardiac, the next step would be to determine if there is any problem with fracture of the wires that may have been used to close up the incision - this evaluation would best be done by a cardiac surgeon. Depending on how far away you are, this could be done by your local doctors.