Mostly, though, Amplatz spent his hiatus working on new inventions: “I took out three patents during that time, which now belong to me,” he says. That’s in contrast to all of the patents he assigned to Minnesota companies over the years, including the 13 displayed on AGA’s lobby wall. His new patents aren’t for occlusion devices, he says, but for “something involving peripheral arteries and some technical aspects of introduction techniques.” Just modest things a person might come up with when he has no actual work to do.
So AGA Medical’s source of products has returned in the form of an octogenarian skier, tennis player, and windsurfer, fluent in five languages. Amplatz sits at a desk littered with catheters and small brass machining molds, fed up with judges, lawyers, and all of their affairs, and glad to be back. “I have six or seven projects lined up,” he says, “mainly experiments to have different modified occlusion devices approved by the FDA.”
Has Amplatz not heard the news that people in their 80s are
supposed
to relax, especially when sent to the showers by a
court?
“That’s one
thing I never learned very
well—relaxing, when you
mean doing
nothing,”
he says.
“I’m relaxed, but I
always have to do
something.”
From a parent’s letter to AGA Medical after an occlusion procedure done on Jenna, age 3: “The next morning, she woke up and was ready to go. We walked down to x-ray and ran back for the EKG and ECG. Then we were ready to go home. We got to our house at 11:30 a.m. (less than 24 hours after her procedure) and Jenna was on her tricycle five minutes later. We had to work hard to make sure she didn’t overdo it. While we were trying to keep her somewhat subdued, all she wanted to do was run and play.” |
