Leaving Your Buddy in Jail: A Simplified Approach to the Jailed Buddy Wire Technique

Stent delivery into highly tortuous and/or calcified coronary lesions represents a challenging problem during PCI. In this case series of 7 patients with complex coronary lesions, we had a hard time delivering larger and thus bulkier stents. We used a buddy wire and delivered a stent into the most distal lesion and jailed the buddy wire. We left the wire jailed during the whole procedure and were easily able to deliver large and long stents to the more proximal lesions. Retrieval of the buddy wire was possible without problems in all cases. The "leaving your buddy in jail" technique provides an excellent support and allows facilitated delivery and deployment of multiple stents, if necessary overlapping stents, into challenging coronary lesions.