A man from Herriman is alive and well right now because of a procedure that would have been unavailable the month before he got it. He had a kind of aortic aneurysm that kills almost 10-thousand Americans every year.
“I’m feeling great right now. And I hope I can feel the same feeling for the next year's,” said patient Antonio Gomez.
Gomez didn’t know he was close to death when doctors found an aneurysm in his aorta this year. His wife Nilsa Gomez cared for him through the ordeal.
“When he went home, he was unable to do anything by himself…he was in bed, he was weak. I gotta do everything for him,” she said. “An Aneurysm is a ballooning of a blood vessel…the weakened walls fall and flex with blood pressure. It’s particularly scary because the aorta is like a watermain. It’s the pipe that if it bursts…water, or in this case blood, goes everywhere it’s not supposed to without going where it’s needed.”
Intermountain vascular surgeon Evan Brownie said Antonio was almost there. “His aneurysm had more than doubled in size within a month of its diagnosis, which was a concerning factor for us and put them at a higher risk of rupture.”
Antonio needed the pioneering procedure Brownie and his colleague, cardiac surgeon John Doty started performing in August. It’s called a Thoracic Branch Endoprosthesis.
“What this procedure is, is a stent graft that rewinds that tear or that outpouching. Like you would puncture in a tire,” said Brownie.
That avoids the worst pitfalls of older procedures.
“20-25 years ago, this would have been done through an incision in the chest separating the ribcage, where the patient would have been put on a heart lung bypass machine cooled down, the heart and the heart machine that turned off to completely stop flow while that segment of the aorta was replaced with a graft,” said Brownie. The procedure at Intermountain keeps blood flowing. The surgeons make just two incisions. “Delivered through a puncture in the artery in the groin, and a puncture in the artery in the arm,” said Brownie.”
For Gomez, this procedure was truly a lifesaver. “He's working again, he's doing much better. He got to keep taking care of things you know, and we do it together. We feel so grateful with the doctors of course and with the nurses,” said Nilsa Gomez. Dr. Brownie is also pleased with Gomez’s prognosis.
“It's wonderful. Hearing him talk actually brought a tear to my eye, and it really reinforces how privileged we are to get to take care of patients with these complex problems and see them do as well as they do,” said Brownie.
That device is the result of decades of research and Dr.’s Brownie and Doty are the only ones using it in the Intermountain West.
