David Haugh: After finishing Boston Marathon 11 weeks after open-heart surgery, Chicago man keeps running

Mark Buciak was given two alternatives to fix his leaky heart:

A cow valve.

Or a mechanical device.

The long-distance runner from Chicago, who became the first Illinois competitor to finish 40 straight Boston Marathons on Monday, had a question about a third option.

"Do you have any cheetah valves?" Buciak asked Patrick McCarthy, Northwestern Memorial Hospital's chief of cardiac surgery. "Because I'd really like to come out of this running faster."

Buciak sat in McCarthy's office 13 years ago, a healthy 45-year-old man who got the shock of his life after a routine physical. An electrocardiogram (EKG) months earlier during his regular visit to Dr. Nadim Khoury had detected atrial fibrillation - commonly called