English to Italian Medical Medical: Cardiology intervento di endocardite

It still amazes me that so many advances in heart treatment
occurred in the decade
just after
my grandfather died, and so
many of them in Minnesota, too, only a few hours’ drive from
the hospital in Fargo where I stood with Dr. Shah in the operating
room that Christmas morning. Our patient’s open chest
was framed by sterile towels, like blue curtains stained with
punch. Shah’s red-streaked
fingers moved surely, precisely, as if
each digit were
following a programmed script. We were
about
fifteen minutes in, the heart quivering in fibrillation, when he
applied blade to muscle and sliced open the left atrium. Tears
of blood streamed from the slit. He reached into the heart and
pulled up on the patient’s infected mitral valve with sutures,
urging me to come in closer for a better view. The infected
growths on the leaflets were
small and white, like a baby’s teeth,
and seemingly just as innocuous. It was hard to believe they had
almost killed the man.