A 67-year-old woman with advanced osteoporosis went to her doctor because she had been short of breath for three months. Her blood work was clean. High sensitivity troponin, natriuretic peptide and D-dimer all came back normal. Then the echocardiogram found something that should not have been there: a long, rigid, motionless object sitting in her right atrium, angled across the chamber toward the tricuspid valve.
It was bone cement. Nine months earlier, she had undergone vertebroplasty at the L1 to L3 vertebrae, a procedure in which acrylic cement is injected into a collapsed vertebral body to stabilize it. Some of that cement had escaped the bone, traveled through the venous system, and set inside her heart.
