"A Major Rebuilding" - 
Complicated Open-Heart Surgery at Genesis Saves Bettendorf Woman
(Posted 2/8/06

When your heart surgery team calls you "The Miracle Lady," you wake up every morning giving thanks to be alive.  Just ask Mary Ann Fromm of Bettendorf. 

One morning, she woke up feeling frighteningly strange and remembers hearing blood "whoosh" inside her body.  "I thought I was having a stroke," she recalls.  "I tried to call 911 and couldn't see to dial the telephone.  My husband was out playing golf at the time, and I was helpless.  I thought, 'Either I live or I die,' and went back to sleep.  When he came home, I told him to call 911." 

Fromm of Bettendorf had an aortic dissection, an often-fatal disorder in which the inner lining of the aortic wall tears.  When that happens, blood can surge through, separating the middle layer of the wall from the still-intact outer layer.  As a result, a new false channel forms in the wall of the aorta, the body's largest artery. 

Her dissection was more extensive than most.  Her dramatic open-heart surgery at Genesis Medical Center, Davenport, illustrates the breadth of care that Genesis Heart Institute patients receive from nationally recognized surgeons who work and live here in the Quad Cities area. 

The dissection began in the ascending aorta, where it split and bled into the wall of the artery.  It traveled up her neck and into her head; out the right arm; down to the back of her chest; into her leg; and, upward into the heart, where it ruptured into her pericardium and tore the aortic valve.  "They basically had to rebuild me," she says.  As a dissection advances, it causes a variety of consequences depending on where blood flow is blocked.  These can range from stroke, heart attack, sudden abdominal pain, lower back pain, and nerve damage that causes tingling or an inability to use a limb.  

"It's a blessing that she doesn't remember much about what happened to her.  She had a lot of sudden, extensive pain," says Fromm's cardiothoracic surgeon Shauna Roberts, M.D., who is medical director of the Genesis Heart Institute.  

"She not only dissected her entire aorta from her heart to her legs, but it went up her carotid artery.  She should have died right there of a stroke.  But when she came to the Emergency Room she was awake, able to make some sense and had no evidence of a stroke."  

Complicating matters was the fact that her aorta ruptured at the onset of surgery - before she had been placed on the heart-lung machine."  She was actually without vital signs for a short period of time," Dr. Roberts says.  "We quickly got her on the heart-lung machine; fixed the rupture; and restored the blood supply.  We replaced the ascending aorta, repaired the valve and had to tack down the slit layers that were going into the carotid artery and right arm to try to get blood flow back into the correct channels.  It was a major rebuilding."  

Most aortic dissections occur because the artery's wall deteriorates, most commonly from plaque that erodes the arteries and allows instability and bleeding or from congenital syndromes such as Marfan's disease.  In Fromm's case, inflammation in her arteries caused by giant cell arteritis led to the breakdown in the aortic wall.  "They tell me I'm lucky to be alive and call me the miracle lady," she says. 

Two-and-a-half years later, she is still undergoing cardiac rehabilitation at Genesis and attends water aerobic classes at the Bettendorf Family YMCA.  "I want to keep my heart working and get the exercise I need to stay healthy," she says.