HEART AND VASCULAR
Doug Shaffer has a passion for photography, a hobby he resumed after a serious heart condition nearly took his life. St. Luke’s Heart and Vascular team implanted a pacemaker-defibrillator to improve his heart pump function and performed a unique mitral valve replacement procedure to stop a ‘torrential’ leak.
DETERIORATING HEART AND ‘TORRENTIAL’ VALVE LEAK REQUIRE TEAM APPROACH Doug Shaffer is lucky to be alive. He and his wife, Janell, agree on that point. While they joke it’s because of Doug’s stubbornness, they truly believe it was the actions from St. Luke’s Heart and Vascular team that saved his life. Seven years ago, Doug began seeing Keith Kopec, MD, St. Luke’s cardiologist, because he was feeling tired and weak. “Doug has one of the most complicated histories of any patient I’ve cared for,” shared Dr. Kopec. “He
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was initially found to have sleep apnea, and he had a lot of premature heartbeats weakening his heart. “He didn’t have any blockages in his heart arteries, so we put him on a medication to suppress the skipped beats,” Dr. Kopec continued. “He did pretty well for about four and a half years, but in late 2020, he had progressive, widespread weakness and weight loss. We repeated an echocardiogram and found his heart was pumping very poorly – much worse than when I initially met him – and his mitral valve was leaking badly.”
Keith Kopec, MD Cardiologist
