Matters of the HEART

BY ANDY GREDER // IMAGE OF DR. KAPPHAHN PROVIDED BY ESSENTIA HEALTH

Dr. Sam Kapphahn offered her first medical opinion at age six. The kindergartener and her grandmother had gone to check on an elderly neighbor and found the retired farmer unresponsive in his home.

“According to my grandmother, I went over, felt for his pulse and declared that he had died,” Dr. Kapphahn says. The check-up seemed like the natural thing to do since she’d already decided she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up.

Thirty years later, Dr. Kapphahn is an interventional cardiologist at the Essentia Health Heart and Vascular Center in Fargo. The board-certified cardiologist treats heart problems, often in emergency situations, and then works with patients to improve their heart health.

Growing up in rural Minnesota has made her a better doctor, Dr. Kapphahn believes. She points to the opportunity to play three sports at West Central Area High School and also participate in speech, band and theater.

“That upbringing allows you to be very versatile and interact with a lot of different types of people,” explains Dr. Kapphahn, who lived on a farm near Elbow Lake. “It makes it easier to have a common ground or common understanding. As a doctor, your ability to relate and form relationships or connections with people is extremely important.”

Dr. Kapphahn wants to make a difference by providing the same high quality heart care to people who live in Fargo-Moorhead and rural areas. She finds it rewarding to regularly travel to see her patients at Essentia Health clinics in Wahpeton, Detroit Lakes, Fosston and Park Rapids.

“Patients shouldn’t have to settle for second-best because they live where they live,” the physician says. “I don’t think people should be limited by geography. I want to level the playing field.”

Dr. Kapphahn is pleased to be back in FargoMoorhead, where she did her undergraduate studies at Concordia College. She earned her medical degree from Western University of Health Sciences and the College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific in Pomona, Calif. Next, she hopped to the East Coast for her residency in internal medicine at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. She did her fellowships in cardiovascular disease and interventional cardiology at North Shore and Long Island Jewish Health System in New Hyde Park, N.Y.

“Every experience you have helps create you in terms of how you approach life, how you approach challenges,” says Dr. Kapphahn, 36. “For me, it’s been rewarding to go to places where I didn’t have the family structure and essentially start from scratch and deal with the challenges.”

Dr. Kapphahn says training and living in California and New York prepared her to better communicate with different kinds of people and approach care as “a partnership and not a dictatorship.” She believes patients and their families deserve to have a voice when it comes to their care.

Dr. Kapphahn says the most exciting part of her job is working with patients who are having a heart attack. “They’re particularly fascinating for me because it’s often life or death,” she says. “The stakes are very high and that’s the appeal.”

But opening a clogged artery or inserting a stent is only where her work begins. “Then it’s the relationship that you build with them that helps prevent them from having another heart attack or prevents them from having heart failure that gets worse and affects their quality of life,” Dr. Kapphahn explains. [AWM]