What is the preparation for a coronary artery bypass graft?

What is the preparation for a coronary artery bypass graft? So coronary artery bypass grafting is an operation that is done to treat coronary artery disease. It is generally an operation where you would bypass the blockages in the coronary arteries by taking some vein from the leg and also an artery from inside the chest called left internal mammary artery. For this operation you would require to be prepared for you to have a safe operation and the preparation generally includes coming to the hospital for some blood tests. These blood tests are are carried out to look for anemia, which means a low hemoglobin level. They are also used as a screening test for ruling out significant liver or kidney disease. You would have a chest X-ray, which gives us a lot of information about the status of your lungs. If there is any abnormality picked up on this chest X-ray, which is a screening test again, assess your fitness for anesthetic, then that particular abnormality would be investigated further. And the whole idea is to optimize you to have a safe general anesthetic and then safe operation. There are some special investigations that we do specifically looking at the nature of the narrowing and where we are going to do the bypasses. These include coronary angiogram, which is an invasive test in which a dye is injected into these arteries and then x-rays are taken, which give us information about the site of narrowing in the coronary arteries. We also do an echocardiogram, which is a scan of the heart to look at how strong the heart muscle is. In other words, we are looking for heart function. We also, on the echocardiogram, look for any additional conditions which may need to be treated at this time of the bypass operation. And generally, what we are looking for is the presence of any valvular heart disease so that if your heart valves have got significant disease in them, then we would fix that at the time of the bypass operation.