Hi Everybody. I'm thrilled to have found this board and hear of other's experiences. There's so little on the topic out there, that I was beginning to feel I was the only person to experience all these things that have been going wrong with my body. Just to give you a little background . . . I'm a 47 YO and on July 4th of 2004 I ended up in Encino Medical Center with what they thought was pneumonia. I had developed shortness of breath about a week before and was slowly getting worse. Every day I was in the hospital I grew worse, edema, ascites, my liver was shutting down, my kidneys were beginning to fail, and the only diagnosis they could come up with was congestive heart failure and pneumonia. Finally, my body just started to repair itself without any medical help other than the Lavetril (sp?) I was given for the pneumonia. Four weeks from the day I was admitted I was released, but feeling worse than I had when I went in! I've been on Lasix and Aldactone ever since. In spite of the diuretics, over the past year I have continued to accumulate water. I've had numerous thorenthesis' and parenthesis' performed, which temporarily relieve the ascites and shortness of breath symptoms, but only for about two weeks before it's all back. I'd guess I'm carrying around about four liters of ascites right now, which is not too bad for me. Usually it's much worse. I have been to tons of specialists through my Blue Sheild HMO network, all of them were useless. No signs of the obvious, cancer, heart disease, liver disease, autoimmune problems . . . nothing. I finally broke down a few weeks ago and flew to the Mayo in Scottsdale to have them do a complete workup. Unfortunately, this was self-funded, so I second mortgaged the house to pay for it . . . but, I did get answers. Eight days of testing and they diagnosed constrictive pericarditis. They asked me to have an angiogram just to confirm their findings once I got back to Los Angeles. I switched my Blue Shield to PPO and found a new cardiologist, Dr. Swerdlow, to check everything out. He found the same thing that the Mayo did, and said all that remains is to have the surgery. As he explained it, arriving at a diagnosis for CP is really a process of eliminating everything else. The final test is measuring the pressures within the two halves of the heart . . mine were exactly even, which he says is the definitive symptom that confirms CP. I'm meeting with a thorasic surgeon this Friday to go over my options: Dr. Richard Kass based in Los Angeles, who will perform the surgery at Cedars. However, I read somewhere in the archives a post by Cathy that Cedars told her they were not experienced enough in this type of surgery. Cathy, was that a staff surgeon and do you remember who? I sure don't want to wander down the wrong road now! Everyone here stresses how rare this disease is and how hard it is to find a surgeon. In your guys' opinion, how many of these surgeries should a surgeon have performed? My cardiologist tells me the surgery itself is rather crude, and the skill of it is knowing when to stop removing the pericardium (akin to peeling an onion in his words), and the real benefit of a good doctor comes immediately after the surgery as that is when the majority of the complications can occur. So, please, any recommendations of surgeons in the LA area that have been used by readers of this board would be really helpful. And, just plain advice on where the best place to go and the best person to perform it anywhere in the nation would also be greatly appreciated. I wasn't really that worried about the surgery until I found out more about it! In my mind it seemed much simpler than say a bypass operation . . but, as I'm learning, there seems to be a lot more to it. Thank you in advance and I'll be sure to keep you updated of how things work out for me from here on out. Scott