THE LIFE of a 37-year-old mother of four has been saved following the implantation in her abdomen of an artificial heart pump at Dublin’s Mater hospital in the first operation of its kind in the country.
Elaine O’Hara from Ballinteer, Dublin was bed-bound due to a heart condition up to a few weeks ago. She had been given just weeks to live as antibodies in her blood made her unsuitable for a heart transplant.
As her heart surgeon Freddie Wood put it yesterday, she was “dying” when it was decided to offer her a piece of new technology normally only used to buy time for people awaiting heart transplants. However, in Ms O’Hara’s case the pump is regarded as a “destination treatment”, meaning she is likely to have it for life unless other medical advances in the future make her suitable for a heart transplant.
Thanks to the new device, called a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) which is a battery-operated mechanical pump-type appliance that is surgically fitted to help maintain the pumping action of a heart that can’t work effectively on its own. Ms O’ Hara is now back on her feet and was well enough to be discharged from hospital yesterday after an eightmonth stay.
She said she was looking forward to getting back to doing normal things like bringing her youngest children to school.
“I feel absolutely brilliant. I’m so chuffed now to be able to get up and walk around,” she said. “If I hadn’t got it put in I was deteriorating so much I would probably have died.”
The only visible sign of what she has been through is a bag over her shoulder in which the rechargeable batteries and electronic controls for her implanted device are held. A white tube from the bag runs through her tummy into the implanted device which fits neatly under the rib cage and comes at a cost of about €90,000.
Ms O’Hara said she was looking forward to a great Christmas as it was just before the festive season last year that her health suddenly deteriorated. She had been diagnosed with a heart condition after the birth of her youngest child Sarah, seven years ago, and was put on medication to alleviate breathing difficulties. This worked until late last year when suddenly she couldn’t even walk anywhere. “I had no breath at all. I wasn’t able to do anything,” she recalled.
The operation to implant the device took close to eight hours. Mr Wood said up to 3,000 people had been implanted with the device around the world to date, most of them getting it as a bridge to transplant. It wasn’t known, he said, how long the device would last in a patient like Ms O’ Hara. But there were certainly people still alive and fully active four and five years after implantation.
“She had a life expectancy of four to five weeks,” he said.
“We were faced with the dilemma of having a 37-year-old woman, a mother of four kids, dying and what to do . . . she was very courageous in agreeing to go ahead and we did it at the end of August and she’s made a great recovery,” he added. “People with this device are fit enough to go to the gym and work out and do normal activities.”
Mr Wood said, however, that the thickness of the tube through the abdominal wall could potentially give rise to infections. “Hopefully we won’t have too much of a problem with it in Elaine’s particular case. But at least we’ve got her home to her family again and we’ll take it from there.”
The device takes blood from the left ventricle and returns it to the aorta.