In an indelible pearl of wisdom, our anatomy professor told us that a cardiac anomaly can sometimes cancel another anomaly, if only incompletely. For instance, if a valve does not open, blood must find a path around the obstruction. Such a detour—a hole between chambers, for example, or an anomalous connection—can have devastating consequences in an otherwise normal heart, but in a diseased heart it may actually attenuate the pathology. In the human heart, he said, two wrongs can make an imperfect right.
