A Higher Degree of Healthcare

What started out as a typical summer day out on the water suddenly turned into a life-threatening situation for Lily James.

James was boating on Lake Washington with her friends and family when the wind lifted an inflatable inner tube that was tied to a rope. Without notice, the rope caught her legs and abruptly pulled her overboard, nearly severing her left foot and leaving her right foot hanging by a tendon. James was rushed to Harborview Medical Center, where surgeons quickly worked to save her feet.

Doctors weren’t sure if James would ever walk again, but 11 years and over 20 surgeries later, she’s back to playing sports and doing what she loves.

Confined to a dark room due to splitting headaches, double vision and a loud whooshing sound in her ears, Michelle Catchot knew something was terribly wrong.

The problems appeared suddenly and didn’t let up. Catchot, who is from California, flew to Harborview Medical Center, where Dr. Michael Levitt of the UW Medicine Neurosciences Institute placed a stent in Catchot’s brain to relieve the fluid buildup caused by a condition called Pseudotumor Cerebri. Harborview was the only hospital on the West Coast offering this rare procedure.

Years later, Catchot has made a full recovery and is back to what she loves: making wine and riding horses.

Ken Price waited his entire life to catch his breath. Then the transplant surgery team at University of Washington Medical Center helped him breathe easy — for the first time ever.

Cystic fibrosis caused breathing problems for Price since childhood, but after he received the first-ever double-lung transplant at University of Washington Medical Center, his condition quickly improved. Within four weeks of transplant he was getting active again and has since completed many bike races and a marathon, even completing the Seattle-to-Portland bike event in a single day.

More than 25 years post-transplant, Price is still going strong.

Myra Gaines was running out of options — and time. The 87-year-old’s artificial heart valve was failing, but her condition was too grave to endure open-heart surgery to have it replaced. Doctors worried if they tried, she wouldn’t survive.

Enter Dr. Danny Dvir, an internationally recognized cardiologist at the Heart Institute. Dvir and his team performed a first-of-its-kind procedure allowing him to safely operate on Gaines. During the 2.5-hour surgery, doctors used a catheter threaded through Gaines’ veins to reach her heart and cut the old valve before implanting a new one.

Before her surgery, taking a short trip to the store would leave Gaines exhausted. Now she’s back to doing chores and walking around her neighborhood four times a day.

In 1995, a patient told Dr. Teri Brentnall he was worried about developing pancreatic cancer because his father, grandfather and three uncles had all died from the disease. She was touched by her patient’s story and that had unforeseen impact: It led Brentnall to discover a genetic link to familial pancreatic cancer.

To help her patient and discover why so many members of his family developed this often-fatal disease, Brentnall and her colleagues created a surveillance program and compared DNA samples between those who did and did not have pancreatic pre-cancer. After a decade of research, they found that the family members with pancreatic pre-cancer also had a mutated form of the Palladin gene.

Brentnall’s work has widespread effects: She saved her patient, and many in his family, from getting pancreatic cancer and revolutionized how programs screen for this type of cancer across the world.

Very few can say they’ve literally held someone’s heart in their hands. Dr. Mark Reisman of the UW Medicine Heart Institute is one of them, thanks to his work with researcher Dmitry Levin from the University of Washington’s Center for Cardiovascular Innovation.

Reisman and Levin created a new approach to prepare for heart procedures by 3-D printing exact models of patients’ hearts. These 3-D replicas allow doctors like Reisman to fully examine the heart and practice catheter procedures before operating on the patient. The ability to physically hold the heart models helps Reisman determine which tools to use for each surgery, cutting down on the time spent doing so during the operation.

Practicing procedures on 3-D printed hearts translates to safer and faster heart procedures — and more lives saved.