Claudio Marra is the heart surgeon at the Monaldi hospital in Naples who operated on Gennaro Reparato, the 51-year-old from Secondigliano who was left paralyzed and whose body is devastated by a huge bedsore. “The doctors and nurses in this department are doing everything they can to ensure the best possible care, the patient and his wife know this well. I have been here for more than two months now,” the specialist explained to the newspaper Il Roma, which broke the news. Marra explains: “He arrived here with acute coronary syndrome from the hospital in Giugliano, where I myself had gone to visit him for a consultation. He had a critical lesion in the most important artery of the heart. A very compromised situation. He arrived with an aggressive chronic obstructive arteriopathy, with occlusion of the abdominal aorta, the femoral aorta, the subclavian aorta. Suffice it to say that they were unable to enter with the probe to perform the coronary angiography. Due to the condition of the coronary arteries, it was not even possible to intervene with an angioplasty. To recover tissue for the bypasses, I had to cut into the mammary artery. However, the operation went well, the heart immediately regained contractility”. On the risks of the operation, Marra specifies: “We assessed a preoperative risk of 18%. We already consider it high at 5%. And it should be noted that this is a young patient, so that percentage is not due to age, but to his clinical condition. I was on vacation when colleagues warned me about this. The patient first felt pain, then paraplegia set in. It is not a consequence of the operation. In the days before, the family reported that he had already had sacral pain before the operation and that to avoid it the only thing he could do was stand up. We did everything we could do in good conscience, we did not unload the patient onto other facilities, we looked for all possible ways for treatment”.
