Sebastian Junger

I stabilized and they brought me to the interventional – the cath lab, the interventional radiology suite.

And what interventional radiology is, it's a freaking miracle, right?

Like 20 years ago, I would have been dead, right?

I mean even – the advances are so fast and so miraculous.

So what they do is they put you on something called a fluoroscope, which is basically sees into you with x-rays, but it's x-ray video, right?

So they can see in real time what's going on in your body, and then they pop a hole into your femoral from your right groin.

and they insert a catheter into it, which is a flexible rubber tube or wire.

And because of the way the heads of these catheters are designed, they have little shepherd's crooks and little curves and all this stuff, and they can navigate through your venous system, through the twists and turns, and they can get that thing

almost anywhere in your body.

And then once they're there, they can pop a coil and plug a leak or they can inflate and put in a stent or whatever.

They can do miraculous things.

They can inject radioactive dye and then they see where it goes and they turn on the fluoroscope and then they can see, ah, the dye is leaking into the abdomen from here.

Here's where the leak is.

It's amazing what they can do, right?

And so they popped an entry into my femoral and then threaded a catheter up through my venous system.

And because of this ligament that's in the wrong place, the arteries in my abdomen are very distorted, right?

And they're tortuous.

They're called tortuous.

And they couldn't get...

the catheter through these twists and turns right and um they couldn't get it to the site of the bleed which they knew where it was right and they couldn't get the catheter there the alternative if you can't fix it with the catheter is you pull your gear out and you send the guy to the or and you do this crazy like race against time but you cut them open