“I didn’t realize how bad I was,” she recalls. “I felt like I got another chance.”
A diagnosis of pneumonia sent the 69-year-old Carteret grandmother of two to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Rahway, where she also learned there was another reason for her fatigue and breathing problems—heart failure.
“She was tired, short of breath, and her legs were swollen,” said Michael Chen, MD, chair of cardiology at RWJ Rahway and Mrs. Carr’s husband’s cardiologist. “We did an echocardiogram that revealed an enlarged heart.”
Mrs. Carr’s heart was struggling. Three of her coronary arteries were blocked, and the aortic and mitral valves in her heart—the inflow and outflow valves for oxygenated blood—were leaking.
Dr. Chen called cardiothoracic surgeon Mark Anderson, MD, chief of cardiac surgery at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick.
The question was whether Mrs. Carr was a candidate for open-heart surgery.
If deemed she could not sustain the rigors of the operation, her options were limited. She could receive an implantable defibrillator, which would have left her with a poor prognosis, or she could be on the list for a heart transplant, explained Dr. Anderson, who is also a professor of surgery at UMDNJ–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Dr. Anderson, along with cardiologist Amardeep Saluja, MD, believed Mrs. Carr could withstand the operation.
Mrs. Carr was frightened and decided to leave the decision about her surgery to her daughter.
“Dr. Anderson called my daughter on his cell phone and told her everything,” recalls Mrs. Carr, who heard the conversation from her bedside. “He told my daughter, ‘I know I can do this’ and my daughter said, ‘Do it.’”
Coming through a triple bypass, aortic valve replacement, and mitral valve repair put an enormous strain on Mrs. Carr’s already weakened heart, so Dr. Anderson implanted a small mechanical pump to help move oxygenated blood from the left ventricle, the heart’s lower left chamber, through the body. The device, called a left ventricular assist device or LVAD, was easy to implant and easy to remove, said Dr. Anderson. Once her heart regained strength, Mrs. Carr was weaned off the device, and it was removed.
Mrs. Carr was discharged from RWJ in New Brunswick on May 18, two weeks after her operation. Today, she says she feels good and is able take deep breaths.
Mrs. Carr was fortunate in that she was able to access the collective expertise of the Robert Wood Johnson Health System, which is made up of experienced community physicians, her local hospital, and an academic medical center with the experience and technology to perform the complex surgery she needed.
“Everyone was so gracious and concerned,” she said of the care at both hospitals. “It could not have been better.”
Today, Mrs. Carr is more mindful of symptoms, noting that she had noticed her legs were swollen last spring but thought it was because she was just “slowing down.”
“I didn’t realize how bad I was,” she recalls. “I felt like I got another chance.”