HEART DISEASE

A holistic approach to heart care

By Patti Muck Bill Robertson fi rst felt severe chest pain on the way to his 67-year-old father’s funeral in East Texas. His dad died of a heart attack after a lifetime of health problems, including fi ve heart bypass operations.

“You just can’t run from the family history,” Robertson says. Over the next two years, the owner of his own Web design, marketing and photography company received seven catheterizations and three stents, all of which worked for about six months before a heavy pressure feeling returned to his chest.

A year ago, Robertson’s cardiologist Dr. Mashesh Ramchandani suggested he take the next step and seek a more permanent fi x. Methodist’s multidisciplinary team of experts gave this patient a host of options. Cardiovascular disease and its complications can be all-encompassing. It is fueled by atherosclerosis, the disease process that affects arterial walls and leads to blockages. It is a systemic and unrelenting disease that demands lifelong vigilance to keep it at bay. Rarely does it limit itself to the heart, so physicians can’t treat just one spot, one area of plaque buildup or one ulcer. The manifestations of atherosclerosis can pop up in the heart, brain, kidneys, legs — any one of the body’s so-called “vascular beds.”

A disease with such complexity and overlap demands a team approach, much like the multidisciplinary approach to cancer treatment that has developed over the past decade. The Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center cultivates this holistic approach to treating its patients with heart problems. Experts in interventional cardiology, vascular and cardiothoracic surgery, electrophysiology and other specialties look at the entire patient before they recommend action.

“Really the proper treatment nowadays for a patient with cardiovascular disease syndrome should involve input from a multidisciplinary team, and very few places offer that,” Ramchandani says. “What we’re doing now at the heart center is recognizing that what we want to treat is the disease, and there’s a convergence of specialties with people who have different types of expertise. It’s a more holistic approach.”

When Robertson consulted with Ramchandani, the surgeon recommended he undergo a minimally invasive single bypass operation. A year later, Robertson has a fourinch scar under his left breast. It’s a far cry from his own father’s long zipper-like chest scar, an incision that forced him to hug a little pillow for relief weeks after bypass surgery. Since Robertson’s own internal mammary artery was used for the bypass, he also lacks the 2-foot-long leg scar from the vein harvesting his father endured.

An added bonus in Ramchandani’s operating room involved performing the surgery on Robertson’s beating heart, without using the heart/lung machine. Robertson and his wife researched surgery and knew one side effect from the heart/lung machine could be personality changes post surgery.

Since surgery, Robertson says his life is different. He watches what he eats, and he exercises more. “I will be 50 this year,” he says. “I see my cardiologist every six months or so, and we do blood work. If the blood work warrants, we may do a stress test. My appreciation for life and my time with my wife is more precious than ever now. I actually got to witness Dr. Ramchandani in surgery recently. It’s just phenomenal.” !

Dr. Mahesh Ramchandani and Bill Robertson