Medical Teamwork Between Super-Specialists Offers Pain-Free New Lease on Life.

It’s easy to tell the story of medical miracles when trauma surgeons rip a patient’s life from the jaws of death so the patient can live happily ever after.

But there are less dramatic medical interventions that are also miraculous.

When medical specialists team together to end 15 years of a patient’s pain and suffering, that’s also a legitimate medical miracle.  Just ask Donna Inman.

“I went to eight different hospitals and I don’t know how many doctors over the years,” she said, “and the doctors at John C. Lincoln are the first ones who were able to take care of me and reduce my pain.”

Inman’s problems started 15 years and seven hospitals ago with something called a “bundle branch block,” a problem in the heart’s electrical system. The human heart is both mechanical and electrical – it is a pump that is regulated by electric impulses.

The bundle branches are components of the heart’s electrical conduction system. If all three of the bundle branches fail, signals no longer reach the hearts main pumping chamber, and this results in the heart slowing severely or even stopping.

In Inman’s case, the heart’s conduction system eventually failed completely, a condition which can only be treated with a pacemaker. That was what Inman’s first group of doctors told her she needed. Normally, a cardiologist will run a wire from the implanted pacemaker through the patient’s veins into the heart. Regulated electric impulses will be sent from the pacemaker to the heart to keep it beating normally.

But Inman’s case was complicated because she was a breast cancer survivor who’d had radiation therapy that had cured her cancer but also damaged her veins. “They told me the radiation had burned up my veins, which made running the wire to my heart difficult,” she said. “They told me the wire got hung up, snagged on something – I spit up blood and I did a code,” she said. After reviving her, “the surgeons got the wire through, but I had a huge hematoma.” That’s a collection of blood in the muscle tissue that frequently causes pain.

“I was back in the hospital two days later,” she said, “hurting from my fingers to my shoulder,” pain that was complicated by the placement of the pacemaker that pushed against her collarbone and caused a chronic ache. Therapy, services at a pain clinic and two subsequent surgeries to reposition the pacemaker on the left side of her chest never quite solved the problem. Finally, new doctors moved the pacemaker to her right side, where it stayed for almost a decade.

But it was always problematic, she said. “I was always sick and hurting. The worst part is that I used to be an active person who could play with my children and grandchildren. We used to have company every weekend; our house was the meeting place for the neighborhood. We’d have people over and barbecue. I was always cooking and I enjoyed that. But after all this started, I just couldn’t do that anymore.”

Finally, five years ago, she went to a world-renowned medical center, where doctors told her that her heart had become so sick that instead of a pacemaker, she needed a defibrillator, a more powerful device for regulating her heartbeat.

For unknown reasons, those doctors did not remove the pacemaker wires from her veins, but implanted the new wires for the defibrillator in her chest, under her skin. “Those always hurt, a lot,” Inman said.

After five years the device battery began to wear out, as is normal, and it was replaced by other Phoenix area specialists. The wires and the defibrillator chafed at the inside of her skin Unfortunately, it eventually wore through her skin and protruded, contaminating the device and leads with bacteria from the skin.

Although Inman didn’t know that the contamination required the removal of the entire system – the device and all of the leads – she had had enough. “I had lived with the pain from that last procedure for almost five years, but finally I told my husband I just couldn’t keep going like that. I had to have a decent life.”

She went to her community hospital Emergency Department, where the heart rhythm specialist frankly told her that he couldn’t fix her problem – but he knew someone who could. He referred her to cardiac electrophysiologist Mark Seifert, MD, a heart rhythm specialist at John C. Lincoln North Mountain Hospital.