A 78-year-old man with uncontrolled diabetes, heart failure, and hemodialysis-dependent end-stage renal disease presented with intractable penile pain secondary to calciphylaxis and necrosis of his glans penis. Given pain refractory to pharmacologic management and refusal of surgery, treatment entailed an ultrasound-guided dorsal penile nerve block with 5 mL of aqueous 4% phenol bilaterally. The patient reported immediate relief and died pain-free 3 months later. While phenol nerve blocks are increasingly uncommon due to local tissue toxicity, the precision of ultrasound leverages phenol’s denaturing and axonal demyelinating properties to facilitate long-term targeted neurolysis to palliate chronic nonmalignant pain.
Left atrial appendage (LAA) occlusion device implantation is becoming a more common alternative for stroke prophylaxis in patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF) who are not able to tolerate long-term anticoagulation. Studies suggest the procedure has a 98.5% successful deployment rate (Boersma et al., 2016). We present a case where a rare but known complication involving dislodgement and migration of an implanted Watchman LAA occlusion device led to functional stenosis of the aortic valve creating a left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) obstruction necessitating emergency cardiopulmonary bypass in the electrophysiology lab to safely retrieve the device.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.