12/08/2026
Two weeks in Milan, and I am still unpacking it.
I spent them at Clinica Veterinaria Gran Sasso (Clinica Veterinaria Gran Sasso ) with Dr. Claudio Bussadori . Somewhere in the middle of it I realised the way I looked at a heart had quietly changed.
It started with the cases. Rare congenital conditions I had only ever met in textbooks were suddenly in front of me, on the screen, in a patient. There is a particular kind of learning that happens when a diagnosis stops being a description and becomes something you have to actually go and find.
Then came the procedures. Watching interventional work and cardiac surgery up close does something to your sense of what is fixable, and how much of that depends on the quality of the imaging that came before it.
But the part that stayed with me was the dissections. Studying congenital malformations after having imaged them, holding the anatomy in your hands, tracing the defect you had been trying to interpret an hour earlier. That closes a loop nothing else closes. I do not think I will ever read an echo the same way again.
Running through all of it was Dr Bussadori himself. A cardiologist in both veterinary and human medicine, moving between the two as though the distinction were mostly administrative. Same heart, same physics, same questions. Watching him work was its own kind of lesson.
I have come back with a lot of knowledge and, more than that, a renewed stubbornness about diagnosing better. Thank you to EAVSI for making this possible.
