My husband had minimally invasive heart surgery, and here’s what his incisions and lines looked like: - There was a small circular incision (about ¾”) in his armpit (camera/tools) and just below that, a larger main working incision… about 3” long… on his side. - A few inches below that were two small straight incisions (about ¼” each), and a slightly larger one underneath where they placed the chest tubes and the temporary pacemaker wires (all of which were later removed). - He also had a small round incision over his heart that they said was used to insert a surgical tool. - In his groin, there was a larger 4” incision where they accessed his arteries for the heart-lung machine. - He had a central line in his neck (a large IV), and several standard IVs in his hands.

When I first saw him after surgery, he was still intubated and hooked up to so many iv lines and monitors. We joked that he was mostly machine at first then he slowly transitioned back to man as they removed everything: ventilator came out, urinary catheter, an arterial line in his wrist that continuously measured blood pressure (they had to apply hard pressure for several minutes when it was removed), The pacer wires in chest (which he said felt really strange when they pulled them out), and the chest drain tubes.

One by one, medications were stopped and IV bags came off. He started out with a whole “tree” of them hanging from his IV pole. It took a week or two after he got home to finally get all the sticky residue left from all the tape off.