Budget Builds: An E@H Top 10 Computer for about $1200 USD

petri33 wrote:

 I've been upgraded with a titanium stent in my heart. That saved my life and cost about 240€.  

I wish I could have gotten a stent, I had 3 way bypass at the end of March this year, it was a bit more expensive though my insurance covered all of it so far. At the 10 day post-op with the surgeon he said my heart had a 25 year guarantee on it, I'm 71 and probably won't live that long so we both laughed.

My cousin has an engineering degree and was working for a company that made stents and he brought one at Christmas time one year so everyone could see how they worked, they are cool and simple. As we were talking we I told him I read a story about a problem every stent was having and that was that the design of the stent, like expanded metal, gave places for the plaque to cling onto and cause another blockage so they would have to do another one for the patients and he said it was a problem they were all working on but hadn't solved yet. I said 'why don't you guys coat with something non sticky so the plaque slides on by?' and he said 'I don't know'. The next story I saw on stents said they had 'fixed' the problem by coating them a non sticky stuff that prevented the plaque from sticking to the stents. I don't know if he got rich off of it or they were already working on something like that but I never got anything...not even a stent!!