It began with that one unexpected phone call from a family member in the middle of the
night. There must be something wrong. There really must be. “Grandma‘s heart stopped,
come....” and the rest was unheard as a typical staggered individual’s ears buzzed and feelings
slowly became numb. All sorts of negative emotions abruptly hit. How can this be happening?
What happened? Was there something wrong with her heart? How can we figure all this out?

The doctor warningly proposed performing one of the most dangerous medical procedures: the
Coronary Angiogram. But before making any decisions, what even is a Coronary Angiogram?
On October 30th, 1958, a basement laboratory accident marked the birth of a
remarkable innovation still prevalent in the medical world today. This unknowing innovation
eventually became a necessary key towards a technology used to enter the heart and other
small organs fundamental to life. During the accident at a hospital in Ohio, cardiologist F. Mason
Sones Jr. had made a mistake injecting a large amount of dye into a patient’s heart (blood
vessel to be specific) during a routine imaging test.

F. Mason Sones Jr. had thought that he brought his patient to their deathbed in the
laboratory. It was long believed that injecting dye into the coronary arteries would cause
ventricular fibrillation, a condition where your ventricle quivers, inhibiting the ability of your heart
to pump blood from your body. But despite that, without the ability to clearly view the coronary
arteries, cardiologists were unable to draw conclusions as to why a person develops heart
attacks and or blocked blood vessels.

Death from heart-related diseases, conditions, and sudden, unplanned attacks are far
more common than you may think. According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, in the United States, someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds, and in one
year, about 805,500 people have died from heart attacks. As you are reading through this
article, someone is also suffering from a heart attack. Our heart plays such a salient role in our
body, but is extremely difficult to study without risking the failure of the heart. Consequently,
before the discovery of the Coronary Angiogram, patients were left without answers to their
questions about the causes of these heart attacks.

A Coronary Angiogram is a procedure used to assess the heart’s blood vessels and to
check for any abnormality or constraints within the heart. This procedure falls under the general
ground of procedures known as Cardiac Catheterization, a procedure used to diagnose, treat,
and solve heart conditions. These procedures use a medical tube known as a catheter. During
the Coronary Angiogram procedure, a special dye that is visible through an X-ray image known
as the Contrast Medium is injected through a catheter into our hearts. An X-ray machine then
takes a series of images that show how and whether or not the dye moves through the heart. It
accentuates any blocked or damaged blood vessels that are at risk of causing a stroke, failure,
attacks, and more.

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Although many people believe that the answer to a long and fruitful life is to be happy,
that optimism is very misleading and inaccurate. It is adequate to maintain a healthy and
preventative lifestyle, but heart-related problems occur unexpectedly and without preparation.
Therefore, a Coronary Angiogram is much more pertinent than you would expect.

Without the innovation of the Coronary Angiogram, lives wouldn’t have been saved,
diseases and abnormalities wouldn’t have been diagnosed, and scientists would still be
pondering about ways to look into our hearts. And to many people, without the Coronary
Angiogram, beloved family members wouldn’t have been saved, nor would it be the muse of an
individual’s passion for such an important medical discovery.