My mother was scheduled for surgery for 1pm, she fasted from midnight til 9pm that night when they finally took her down for the surgery. She waited from 8am til 9pm to have open heart surgery. Her surgeon had worked on another patient for 19 hrs before he came for her, when we asked if we should reschedule Dr. Gleason joked and said "don't worry, I'm the energizer bunny rabbit". Her heart valve surgery was to take 3 hrs, then we we're told he had to go back to do more work. At 4am he pulls whole family out in hallway just outside open waiting room. He was very cold in saying he had to use every valve ring to stop the bleeding, it finally took the smallest one, and she had some clots he cleaned out that would have caused her a stroke. As you can imagine we were very worried as to how see was doing and gonna do, his cold answer was"all I can guarantee is that her valves won't leak"!! In other words, she is probably Gina die, but I did my job. She died 5 months later trying to recover!

Submitted Sept. 25, 2012