Three days after spine surgery, a 54-year-old woman had no symptoms that pointed to her heart. A CT scan did. A thin, linear piece of surgical bone cement had escaped her spine, traveled through her veins, and come to rest in the right atrium, the heart's upper right chamber.
The story did not end there. A later scan showed the fragment had broken in two. And a month after she left the hospital, she came back in septic shock with a suspicious new mass in her heart. She did not survive.
