They use a common medical technique called anastomosis. Basically they just sew the two arteries/vessels together with suture and the blood and tissue seals it as any other cut or nick in the body. Sometimes they use "bioglue" but its not strictly needed, just a timesaver.
And the pig tissue then connects with the human tissue and eventually heals to form a connected vessel? or it never grows together but it is sealed with a blood cloth?
So say I carve a wound onto my skin, and then put live skin with a sufficient tissue match onto it and connect the blood vessels so that the new live skin does not die; then the live skin graft and my own damaged skin will hen heal into each other and form a connected totality?
I didn't know that. Do all heart transplants come with pacemakers then?
Edit: looks like it's just some nerves, not all.
> Your transplanted heart will respond to activity a little differently. Your heart rate will not increase like it used to. And you will have a higher resting heart rate. This is because some of the nerves that control your heart were cut during your surgery.
My understanding -- which should be taken with two grains of salt, I'm a programmer not a doctor -- is that the pacemaker cells which actually go "beat now beat now beat now" are part of the heart itself, and transplanted with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiac_pacemaker
The nerves from the rest of the body are needed to tell these cells "we need more oxygen, beat faster" or "sleepy time, beat slower".
I assume if they could reconnect the nerves to the new heart they would. There's no need to replace the pacemaker cells in the new heart with the old ones though.
The issue simply heals and grows together with the foreign tissue?