Surgery tomorrow Cleveland Clinic Dr. Daniel Clair
 

Tomorrow March 21st I will be having my first of two surgeries with Dr. Clair at the Cleveland Clinic. Since I have not seen much information on here regarding either I wanted to try and let everyone know my experience to hopefully help those looking for a doctor. I am from Michigan and Cleveland Clinic is 6 hours from home and as a lot of us know we sometimes have to travel many hours to find a good doctor. My first visit with Dr. Clair was back in January and my apt was long. Along with a complete physical and evaluation of all my history, (diagnosed with bilateral VTOS, with blood clots in both arms in Sept of '12) the doctor order another venous ultrasound of both arms which they did right in the office that day. Still showing both blood clots and 100% occlusion in both arms starting at a 90 degree angle.

Cleveland Clinic is an amazing place and everyone there is very professional. Today I had appointments starting at 12:30 with blood work, EKG, physical with the vascular surgeons team, clearance with anesthesia, and all the admittance paperwork was done. All in all it took about 3 1/2 hours to get it all done. A few weeks ago I got the schedule in the mail for today and it told me where each place was located, what time to be at each place, and how to get there. There are volunteers all over the hospital so if you ever get lost you just look for someone wearing a red sport jacket and they will tell you.

Tomorrow I am scheduled to arrive at 9:30am and they will get me all setup for surgery. I don't have an exact time of surgery but know I will be following the case in front of me and the surgery is expected to be about 3 hours. After surgery I will be put into a priviate room and I am told I will be released from the hospital the next day (Thursday) in the afternoon. I was surprised to hear I would only be in the hospital over night and hoping the 6 hour ride home goes ok after I am released.

I will update as soon as I can regarding Dr. Clair and how the surgery goes. Hope this helps anyone who may be interested in looking into the Cleveland Clinic.

God Bless you and I pray all goes well. Thank you for posting this because yes, should I ever need to pursue surgery, your doc and CC would be at the top of my list, since I have family that lives just an hour or so south of Cleveland. I grew up there and CC has always been a very good place - like a city within Cleveland. I will be very interested in hearing your updates.

I'm looking forward to reading about your experience. If you only have vascular symptoms, I think a 100% recovery is possible. I hope this is the case with you. Good luck!

Sending well wishes your way! :o

Quick Update
 

I am posting a quick update from my surgery today, I was to be that the hospital at 9:30 this morning and check in at the Surgical Building. At the first desk my husband was given a pager to update him as to my progress and was told that the monitors overhead would alert him as to where I was physically at all times ie OR, recovery, etc. we were asked to have a seat and they would page us when the pre-op room was ready for me.

I was paged about 10:00 and lead to a small pre-op room, IV was started and waited there until they took me off to surgery about 12:30. The staff in the OR was so wonderful, each one of them talked to me separately, introduced themselves and of couse asked me 100 questions. I meet the whole team shy of seeing Dr. Clair himself who showed up after I was sleeping.

I woke up in the surgery room just before they moved me into recovery and I had zero pain. Good pain meds at work. I know I was given Fentanyl in my IV just as I was waking up (which was about 3:00pm) and at the current time the only other thing I have had was Toradol and I pain level is about a 2.

So far so good for being a few hours post op. Ill continue to update as time goes on. Hopefully the worse is over and I won't have any set backs at this time.

Day 2 Post OP
 

Today I am feeling pretty good pain level is maybe 2/3. Had my last dose of Toradol early this morning and now only taking Motrin for the pain. Started to do some small stretches today and moving arm around. Doctor said I can go home tomorrow. Doctor said I will get a prescription for PT to start in about a week but for now just do the small stretches. I will come back for my follow up apt with Dr Clair the day before my left side surgery which is in May. Until than he gave me his cell phone number to call if there are any problems. Dr. Clair and his team have been amazing and very attentive and I would highly recommend him to everyone at this point.

Congrats on pulling through with no complications and good luck on #2 in May.

I had my surgery with Dr Clair as well. He is an excellent surgeon. I do highly recommend him as well. I just recently had a visit with him for a follow up. He performed two surgeries on my left side and tested me again. The left side is doing much better, even though I still have some nerve issues. He wants to wait for the right side because it has responded well to therapy. He will not jump right into surgery unless he feels you really need it. His staff is amazing and I can not say enough good things about how well I was treated.
Good luck with your recovery.

Day 4 post op
 

I was released from the hospital on Friday morning and made the 6 hour journey home just fine. I was given 400mg of Motrin before I left and didn't have to much pain during my ride. I was allowed to take a shower on Friday and boy did it feel good. I have had no further drainage from my jp drain sight so I think Im pretty lucky with that. I started my Lovenox again on Saturday and the doctor was a bit concerned once I started it I may have some more drainage from that sight but everything is good. I have been a bit achy and had a small amount of swelling today but overall the pain has not been bad at all. I am encouraged at this point to have my left side done and hope I have as much success with that one. One thing I am praying is that after the left side is done I will finally be off the Lovenox shots. 8 months of those 2x a day is enough to drive anyone crazy. I will give another update in a few more day. I really hope this helps someone, When I started reading on this forum it was hard to find "good" outcomes to this surgery at all. I know there have been some success stories but it seems that even the good ones still go bad again. I hope that is not the case with mine, Im just a short ways into this and still have a life long journey but I hope this helps others to not be so afraid and know that with a good doctor this does not have to be so scary and painful.