Surgery

From anesthesia to the recovery room, 70-year-old Monna Cleary's children followed her surgery -- 140 characters or less at a time. Twitter is opening doors to the sterile confines of operating rooms, paving the way for families -- and anyone else -- to follow a patient's progress as they go under the knife. Most of the Cleary family tracked the developments from a laptop computer in the hospital's waiting room. But one daughter-in-law kept tabs from work. "It's real-time information instead of sitting and not knowing in the waiting room," said Cleary's son Joe, hours after his mother's surgery at St. Luke's Hospital in Cedar Rapids.

Re "A healthcare battle of a different kind," Sept. 27 Regarding the article on non-emergency wait times in Canada: If you look hard enough, there are many such instances in our own "private" system. I have private insurance and had to wait 13 months for minor outpatient surgery for tendinitis in my right wrist. I am right-handed, and had to go to work and perform normal duties in great pain and discomfort. I was referred to an orthopedic doctor who gave me two cortisone injections in four months, with no long-term benefit on either occasion.

Bypass surgery remains the best option for heart patients with more than one clogged artery, according to the first big study to compare bypass with drug-coated stents. The new research dims hopes that the less drastic stent procedure would prove to be just as good for people with multiple blockages. In the study, heart attack and death rates were lower among people who had surgery than those given artery-opening balloon angioplasty and stents -- mesh cylinders oozing drugs to keep vessels from re-clogging.

Two-year-old twin girls that were formerly joined at the chest and abdomen are back at home in Costa Rica. Yurelia and Fiorella Rocha-Arias were separated by surgery at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University in November and were flown home Monday. The girls arrived in the Bay Area in July and began receiving weekly injections of sterile salt water into balloons placed under their skin. The procedure stretched the skin to compensate for the holes surgeons later cut into their abdomens.

It is hard to silence Dick Vitale, and he returns to the air tonight to broadcast the Duke-North Carolina game on ESPN after an absence of more than two months because of surgery to remove ulcers from his vocal cords. For 3 1/2 weeks, Vitale couldn't speak, instead scribbling madly on a grease board for his wife, Lorraine. "I went through so many pens, so many pads!" he said. A biopsy of the tissue was negative, but Vitale described waiting to hear if the ulcers were cancerous as very difficult.

Evangelist Billy Graham, 89, underwent successful surgery to update a shunt that controls excess fluid in his brain, and was expected to remain in the hospital for several days. Graham was listed in fair condition at Asheville's Mission Hospitals after the 28-minute procedure. Dr. Ralph C. Loomis installed a new valve in the shunt, which can be programmed externally to maintain desired fluid levels and pressure. Graham was expected to remain there until the valve was programmed to regulate the pressure.

Evangelist Billy Graham, 89, returned to his mountainside home in Montreat to continue his recovery from surgery to update a shunt that controls excess fluid on his brain, officials said. Graham underwent the elective surgery Feb. 13.

A transplant surgeon accused of illegally hastening the death of a prospective organ donor acted properly when he ordered sizable doses of pain and anxiety medication for the comatose man, the physician's attorney suggested in court Thursday. Gravely ill, Ruben Navarro "was going to die shortly, whether in minutes or in hours," said attorney M. Gerald Schwartzbach as he asked a question of a witness. "In that situation, you err on the side of ensuring that he's pain-free."

St. Joseph Hospital in Orange is under state investigation for mistakenly doing knee-repair surgery on a patient's good knee, the third "wrong-site" procedure to occur at Orange County's largest hospital since January 2006. The Feb. 15 operation was intended to repair a patient's left knee but was "inadvertently performed on the right knee," according to a statement released by the hospital in response to questions from The Times.

PEORIA, Ariz. -- When Mark Prior got back on a big league mound for the first time since having extensive shoulder surgery, he couldn't have been further removed from his brilliant 2003 season. It was January, and San Diego's Petco Park was empty. His catcher, appropriately, was the team trainer. "There was a little bit of excitement and anxiety about it," Prior said. "I think when it was over with I felt like there was a little bit of accomplishment." Todd Hutcheson, the trainer who sometimes straps on catching gear to help pitchers get in off-season work, didn't have to put down any signs that day. Prior threw only fastballs.