But that winter as she went about her business – working as the public information officer for the City of Albany, caring for her mother, participating in her reading group, taking her dog Stella for long walks – she started noticing symptoms.
“I would get kind of faint, or I would feel out of breath,” Smith recalled.
A physician assistant told her these feelings were caused by her aneurysm and that her heart was having trouble keeping up with her activities. She started taking it easy.
“I stopped walking the dog and taking the stairs for awhile,” she said.
Cardiothoracic Surgeon Edward Bender, MD, recommended valve-sparing root replacement. Through Samaritan Heart Center’s partnership with Stanford Health Care, she was referred to a cardiothoracic surgeon in Stanford’s Heart Surgery Clinic.
“Only a handful of hospitals in the country do this procedure often enough to be considered a source of routinely excellent outcomes,” Dr. Bender said.
The Samaritan-Stanford Health Care partnership allows Samaritan doctors to consult with Stanford’s internationally respected cardiothoracic specialists. It expands on Samaritan’s wide spectrum of services and procedures to include access to even more kinds of life-saving heart surgeries for local patients.
Leading up to her surgery, she had consultations over the phone with surgeons from Stanford, and the surgery was scheduled and all arrangements were made by the time Smith and her husband arrived in Palo Alto at Stanford Hospital. After seven hours of surgery, seven days recovering in the hospital and a few months in cardiac rehab at Samaritan Albany General Hospital, Smith feels back to normal.
