National Harbor, MD
SCVP made it as close to the American capitol of Washington DC as possible without actually being there. Instead, the USCAP meeting was held across the river at National Harbor, Maryland. A fine meeting was held that again highlighted all of the greatness of our society. Events kicked off with our Young Investigator Talks and our third annual Mary Ann Sens Open Mic(roscope) Night. A number of interesting topics were covered including how to do intraoperative cytopathology adequacy on a cardiac biopsy, intravascular lipoproteinosis, renaming histiocytoid cardiomyopathy and others. The prior year Dylan Miller showed a mashup case of myocarditis+amyloid. Not to be outdone, Joe Maleszewski showed a mashup case of giant cell myocarditis+amyloid with the amyloid nearly disappearing in a subsequent biopsy. We are looking for a Fabry+sarcoid+amyloid case for 2020. Scour your archives! The festivities were held at the AC hotel. There was an excellent spread of food and beverages and the audio visual materials were highlighted by a hastily built podium with a nice Open Mic sticker on it.
The Sunday morning sessions were billed as “Heart Transplantation Surveillance.” We filled the room and needed extra chairs so our audience could see multiple excellent presentations covering cell-mediated rejection, antibody-mediated rejection, surgical issues of cardiac allograft rejection, and emerging methods of monitoring for cardiac allograft rejection. The speakers were Annalisa Angelini, Dylan Miller, Ahmet Kilic, and Bruce McManus. The keynote lecture was given by our Distinguished Awardee, Gayle Winters. Her talk “The History of the Endomyocardial Biopsy in Cardiac Transplantation – Still the Gold Standard” was a wonderful historical accounting of how we got to where we are in 2019 with transplant biopsies. Excellent talks all around. If only there was coffee during the coffee break.
Our general business meeting after the sessions saw the passing of the baton to Jim Stone, our new president. As well, Dylan Miller coordinated a fabulous group picture that nicely captures the past and future of our great society.
Sunday evening’s banquet was held at McCormick and Schmicks a local seafood joint in the National Harbor. There was great food and wine. Barbara Sampson and Suzanne Powell wonderfully roasted Gayle Winters. In addition, Paul Hanson was given our young investigator award.
Other great cardiovascular events were held on Monday and Tuesday culminating in the Cardiovascular Evening Session. It was very interesting to get a legal perspective on cases in which things went bad.
The 2020 SCVP Companion meetings will be moving to the west coast, being held in Los Angeles. We look forward to seeing many of you there. Pictures of National Harbor 2019 are below. Clicking on one will start a swipeshow.
