family ever had a problem with anesthesia. Upon learning about my
brother, the anesthesiologist said, "Wow, that sounds like this thing
called malignant hyperthermia that we didn't really know about back
then." While we still didn't know for sure if it was MH that took Will,
the OR team took the appropriate MH precautions during my mother's
surgery.
Flash forward to the early 2000s. I was in medical school and then
residency, on my way to becoming an orthopedic surgeon. Obviously,
I had a lot on my mind, like any young doctor-in-training. But when
MH came up during lectures, I was unusually attentive.
Now, I'd never been tested for MH, because the diagnostic test is a
muscle biopsy — a fairly large piece of muscle, about as big around
and a little bit longer than your thumb, taken out of your lateral thigh.
In the OR, however, I absolutely operated under the assumption that,
because of what happened to Will, I was possibly MH-susceptible. I
always make sure to tell the anesthesia personnel I'm working with
that I could possibly have a genetic mutation that causes MH. That
way, they'd know what was happening in case I ever lost concious-
ness while performing surgery due to vented gases that could trigger
an MH event. Fortunately, nothing like that ever happened. In fact,
I've yet to experience an MH crisis in the OR — with myself or with a
patient — and I hope I never do.
The day of reckoning — the day I had to know, for sure, if I was sus-
ceptible to MH — finally arrived in 2010, during a scary time in my
growing family's life.
My wife was experiencing a complicated pregnancy with our third
child, and we were pretty certain our newborn boy was going to need
surgery. Knowing the MH mutation is genetic, I had no choice but to
undergo the muscle biopsy in hope that we wouldn't need to worry
about MH for my son. It's a good thing I did, too. We found out con-
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