Polite Dissent

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this scene, so I’m just going to engage is some speculation and throw out some ideas. There’s not quite enough information provided to know for sure what is going on. This may be due to cleverness on the writer’s part, or laziness. Regardless, Bendis’s glacial pacing is making this scenario last months.

We know that Luke Cage has had a “cardiac episode” — probably a heart attack — so he needs someone to restore the circulation to the arteries that supply his heart. Non-surgically, this can be done with thrombolytics (“clot-busting” drugs), or by angioplasty. Since he’s undergoing surgery, it seems he’s receiving a CABG (coronary artery bypass graft), the surgical method of restoring the heart’s circulation.

But then the surgeon mentions the pulmonary artery and also mentions a pump in the next panel (not shown here). Why is the surgeon messing with the pulmonary artery? It’s not part of coronary bypass surgery.
Is Cage’s heart so badly damaged that he requires a ventricular assist device to keep him alive (basically, a pump that helps the heart pump)? The doctor is focusing on the pulmonary artery which would mean Cage is getting a right ventricular assist device (VAD) instead of the much more common, and useful, left VAD. Frankly, neither VAD really fit Cage’s situation all that well.
Maybe he meant an intra-aortic balloon pump — which fits the circumstances better — and he just messed up the anatomy.
Or is Osborn up to something nefarious and implanting something nasty (which is my suspicion)? Time will tell, though at this rate my great-great-grandchildren will be reading the conclusion long after I’m gone.

Other thoughts:
♥ If you’re using a scalpel and the skin is “tearing”, then you’re doing something wrong. Surgical scalpels cut through skin like a hot knife through butter — if anything, it’s easy to cut too much.
♥ No mention of “cracking the chest” — opening the rib cage (because it’s hard to reach the heart, otherwise) — though the previous panel does show some rib spreaders at the ready.