A retired legal editor and lifelong New Yorker—apart from the four years she attended college in Boston — Susan didn’t own a car. She walked or rode the subway nearly everywhere she went: museums, libraries, and the Jewish Community Center where she attended classes in Hebrew and biblical archaeology. She took the stairs at MTA stations throughout Manhattan and climbed the steep hills in her Washington Heights neighborhood.
“It isn’t called ‘the Heights’ for nothing,” she says.
One day while she was walking uphill, Susan noticed that her chest hurt on the left side and faint pain radiated down her arm. The discomfort stopped when she got to level ground, so she forgot about it. Then it happened again. And again.
It took a couple of months for Susan to take action. She had no history of heart disease and she’d recently lost her primary physician when he retired. But after several weeks of pain, she could no longer deny there was something really wrong. She called a referral number at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center and was assigned to a physician a few blocks from her home.
That physician happened to share space with a cardiologist, which was fortunate. He was concerned enough that he asked his colleague to take a look at her immediately. The cardiologist ordered a series of blood tests and an EKG. Two days later, she was at Mt. Sinai Medical Center having a procedure to clear and open the major artery in her heart.
Dr. Samin Sharma, Director of Clinical and Interventional Cardiology at Mt. Sinai, treated Susan himself. First, he performed tests that determined her main coronary artery was 95% blocked—causing the pain when she walked uphill, as blood flow to her heart was restricted.
“Sometimes we dilate the blockage with a balloon and then we put in the stent, so all the plaque remains behind the stent,” says Sharma. “But in some cases, the calcium needs to be removed because otherwise, the stent will not expand properly.”
This was the case with Susan. So before he placed the stents in her artery, Dr. Sharma used the Diamondback 360® Coronary Orbital Atherectomy System (OAS) to reduce the calcium allowing for successful delivery of the stent to reestablish blood flow of the heart.
“It was amazing how easy it all was,” she said. “Dr. Sharma did the procedure late one afternoon and I was able to leave the hospital the next day.”
She went home and rested for a few days, reading and studying quietly. But then she got up and resumed her life. And she has not slowed down in the three years since. Today, she is now considering subletting her apartment for a year so she can travel to Israel to visit her extended family and put her Hebrew lessons into practice.
“This treatment was a huge success for me,” says Susan, now 78. “I walk without any pain now. I can do subway stairs and hills again. I can travel. I would tell anyone who is feeling something like this to see their doctor and take care of it right away.”
Results may vary.
The accounts given are genuine and documented. Each story represents a unique individual experience and does not provide any indication, guide, warranty or guarantee as to the response other people may have to CSI technologies.
