[Verse 1] Nineteen sixty-six, London operating light, Ross and Somerville stitch a borrowed aortic pipe, First homograft bridging the right ventricle's door, Sewing history into a beating architecture's core. Sixty-nine, Rastelli writes the blueprint down, Routing blood past the hole, giving transposition a crown, Seventies roll in, Dacron tubes take the stage, Hancock's porcine leaflets flutter through that age, Plastic tunnel, pig-tissue gate, Durable enough, but calcium seals its fate. [Chorus] Cryo first, that's the pulmonary creed, Aortic calcifies faster, that's the speed, Contegra's the vein with a valve built in, ePTFE's the handmade trileaflet twin, Decell the homograft, strip the cellular ghost, Stent-in-a-hood for the grown-up host — Six roads on the conduit menu tonight, Pick the pipe that survives the fight. [Verse 2] Cryopreserved pulmonary, the usual first call, Frozen in nitrogen, slow to ever fall, Aortic cousin's stiffer, thicker in the wall, Calcifies quicker, hears an earlier curtain call. Contegra's bovine jugular, twelve to twenty-two, Natural venous flaps doing what valves do, Stentless porcine, porcine-Dacron hybrid kin, Each one a gamble on how long the seal stays thin. [Verse 3] Yamagishi, Miyazaki, hands stitching ePTFE thread, Trileaflet made from scratch, not harvested from the dead, Japanese series whisper mid-term years that hold, A workshop-built valve standing strong, not cold. Hannover's corlife ESPOIR, Matrix P on the chart, Decellularize the matrix, leave the scaffold, not the heart's donor cells that spark rejection's slow campaign, Strip it clean, let native tissue repopulate the lane. [Verse 4] For the bigger, older chest, no tiny tube required, Stented bioprosthetic valve, hood patch wire-fired, Dropped into the outflow, sewn to native wall, Trading homograft scarcity for a surgeon's judgment call. [Bridge] Every conduit's got a clock, a failure signature, Calcific rind, pannus creep, jet of stenotic pressure, And every choice tonight sets tomorrow's door — Can a catheter valve slide in, or does it need a whole re-score? That question's the hinge where Part Five will convene, Plan the exit before you place the in-between. [Chorus] Cryo first, that's the pulmonary creed, Aortic calcifies faster, that's the speed, Contegra's the vein with a valve built in, ePTFE's the handmade trileaflet twin, Decell the homograft, strip the cellular ghost, Stent-in-a-hood for the grown-up host — Six roads on the conduit menu tonight, Pick the pipe that survives the fight. [Outro] Sixty-six to now, the pipe keeps changing name, Homograft, Hancock, Contegra — none exactly the same, Know the menu, know the clock inside each one, Choose the conduit, plan the sequel before you're done.
← Lesions That Need a Conduit | Mechanisms of Conduit Failure →