SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A big milestone has been accomplished at Mercy General Hospital operated by Dignity Health. The medical facility recently celebrated performing 1,000 transcatheter aortic valve replacement surgeries (TAVR), a minimally invasive procedure to replace a thickened aortic valve that can't fully open.
"This is a disease that we can't ignore, and even during the COVID pandemic, we continued to do these procedures because these patients have a mortality risk," said Dr. Joseph Kozina, an Interventional Cardiologist at Dignity Health.
At the age of 77, Frederick Haugen is the hospital's milestone patient. It took around 45 minutes to replace his impaired aortic valve.
"Tests showed that I had a heart murmur and things were not going well there, so they decided to do the TAVR on me," Haugen said. "I recovered very quickly. I just had to wait for the swelling to go down in my groin area and then everything has been fine — my breathing, my heart, everything."
Haugen quickly went back to daily life with his wife, kids and grandchildren thanks to Dr. Kozina and Dr. Kapil Sharma, a cardiac surgeon at Dignity Health.
He says he wasn't concerned about going to the hospital to seek medical care despite being in the middle of a global pandemic, but, studies have shown that over the past two years, thousands of Americans have chosen to delay routine visits to the doctor's office and avoid going to the ER when they're sick because of COVID exposure concerns at the hospital.
"No one will ever know how many deaths or delays have occurred as a consequence of those kinds of behaviors," Dr. Kozina said. "More importantly in the field of oncology, I think there are gonna be significant issues with the consequence of delay of diagnosis in that field."
Dr. Kozina says hospitals and clinics have numerous safety measures and protocols in place so people shouldn't delay access to healthcare because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Get in and get it done. A delayed diagnosis for something like cancer can cost you our life," Dr. Kozina said. "Later stage disease is always the worst disease to have to handle."
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