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News - Blake Medical Center, Bradenton Florida USA |
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| Blake Medical Center |
| Heart surgery leads to hopeful future |
| Date : - 01/01/2009 |
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A brush with death has brought a new career for former Southeast High School health and physical education teacher Sarah Gaila Morrison.
One year ago, Morrison was so ill she could barely get out of bed.
Today, just eight months after open heart surgery, as a graduate assistant pursuing a master’s degree in public health, she is now helping other heart patients prepare and go through the same ordeal she faced.
Looking back, Morrison, who is now 25, can hardly believe how close she came to death.
Her illness began with profound fatigue and night sweats in the fall of 2007.
“My night sweats were so bad, my bed would just be drenched and I would have to change my sheets,” said the former star of the Bradenton Christian High School girls volleyball team. “I was tired all of the time, so fatigued, I could barely get through the day.”
Morrison’s colleagues at a school in Palm Beach, where she was teaching at the time, were worried.
They encouraged her to see a doctor, but after blood tests and exams, no one could tell her what was wrong.
By March, Morrison was so sick she called her mother in Bradenton for help.
“Come home,” said her parents, Nan and Jim Morrison, a retired Major League Baseball player who spent 12 years with the Philadelphia Phillies, Chicago White Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Atlanta Braves. Morrison now manages a Single A affiliate for the Tampa Bay Rays.
But once again, doctors had no answers. Some dismissed her complaints, because they said she didn’t look sick. A physician at one of the local hospitals even told Sarah she didn’t belong in the ER, because hospitals were for sick people.
But by March 17, Sarah was running temperatures of 103 to 104 degrees at night. She could barely move. She was unable to lie on her back. Breathing was hard.
Alarmed, her mother called Dr. Tom Ganey, a family friend. Ganey told the Morrisons to immediately take Sarah to Blake Medical Center’s emergency room. After examining her test results, Ganey spotted an abnormality in her echo cardiogram.
Ganey called in Dr. Allesandro Golino, a Bradenton heart surgeon who found Sarah had endocarditis, an inflammation or infection of the thin membrane that lines the inside of the heart.
The infection was made worse by a mitral valve prolapse, a common heart disorder that occurs when the valve between the heart’s upper chamber and the left lower chamber doesn’t close properly.
Sarah said her abnormal valve was allowing the blood flow to leak or regurgitate backward into her heart.
“My mitral valve prolapse caused the staph infection to continuously wash through my heart,” Sarah said. “Dr. Ganey said that I could have died if it had not been treated. Dr Ganey was my quarterback; he brought in a team of doctors who saved my life.”
Golino recommended surgery to replace the leaky valve, but the available options forced Sarah to make a difficult decision.
dwright@bradenton.com |
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| Reference : - www.blakemedicalcenter.com/ |
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