Another nother cheese cheese burger burger please

 Patient is diagnosed with a significant Abdominal aortic aneurysm.  So this usually entails a bulging off a major part of the aorta.  All sorts of things can cause it, and you can usually medically treat it with some medication, making sure that enough blood is flowing down to your legs and it doesn't rip open (which is the big risk and usually will require surgery.
Here you can see them exposing and opening the aorta at the site of the aneurysm.  In this very skinny man's case, his was the size of a soft ball. 

Yes, almost everything that you see in that picture that isn't hands, tools or drapes is the site of the aneurysm.

 Oh, the plot thickens.  So the inside of your vessels absolutely should not look like this.  All that browning cottage cheese stuff, it turns out....not so good.  That is the accumulation underneath a plaque that the patient developed caused either by a trauma to the inside of the vessel, fat or mineral deposits, or some other genetic issue.  What has happened is that a bunch of inflammatory mediators and platelets and all sorts of other junk gets stuck under a little area of the plaque causing it to expand and bulge.  Eventually, when the blood vessels is stretched to its max, it will tear and as it tears create a smaller and smaller likelihood of survival. 

This is the same sort of process involved in those "plaque" deposits in your heart.  Except that eventually they tear off and that mass of stuff goes and blocks off a narrower portion of your arterial system. 

Here you see the stuff they pulled out of the artery.  These are all the pieces of gunk that had accumulated there, from different types of blood cells, cholesterol, etc.
Did i mention how it smelled? 
Imagine an infectious wound that has been brewing for a few weeks under a bandage.  It's about like that.







To repair such a thing, it's not like you can give up another vessel in your body to replace your giant aorta like you can with one of your tiny coronary arteries.  That's where the miracle of plastic (i mean silicone) comes in.  Medicine is full of interesting stuff and i love looking through the surgical cabinets to see what all can be replaced in the body from joints to valves to *blooooooood vessels!*  So there are many different sizes of silicone replacement aorta you can get from the tiniest of tiny (like in a neonate that needs palliative care for a congenital problem) to enormous.  This is the biggest i've ever seen.  (Though i did once sit in an OR waiting for the right *length* of vessel because it wasn't standard stock and they come in different materials, diameters, coatings, etc).  This last photo is of that tube.  I would say it was at least 1/3 the length of his aorta when they were done. 
The patient is happily discharged.