Heroic Efforts Bring New Life to Dying Mom

A young woman on the brink of death because of a failing heart is alive today, thanks to a remarkable piece of medical technology and a team of nurses and doctors at Sacred Heart Hospital who kept fighting for her life.

Alison Burr, 23, of Pensacola, knows how close she came to dying before doctors performed a desperate open heart surgery to implant a heart assist pump. “I can’t even explain what that feels like, to know that you were that close to not being around anymore, and because of so many people pulling together and not giving up on you, that is just awesome.”

Alison’s health seemed fine when she delivered a baby girl, Emma, on April 29 of this year. Then in early July, she began to experience fatigue and shortness of breath. By Saturday, July 16, her mother, Lynn Bain, said Alison was so tired that she could barely walk. Lynn took her daughter to Sacred Heart’s Urgent Care Center in Pensacola and told them “something is wrong.”

After ordering a chest x-ray, Dr. Shane Adkison detected fluid in her chest and an enlarged heart. Dr. Adkison thought it might be due to a blood clot on her lung or post partum cardiomyopathy – a rare but life-threatening complication of pregnancy that weakens the heart.

Lynn recalls the doctor telling her: “She’s got to go to Sacred Heart immediately. I have called an ambulance.”

Lynn said she was thinking her daughter had pneumonia. “Only when a cardiologist arrived and said ‘congestive heart failure with an enlarged heart’ did I really start to worry that this is more than a casual problem that an antibiotic was not going to fix.”

Alison was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit and was put on medications to treat blood clots, but a few days later, Alison took a sudden turn for the worse and her damaged heart stopped working. For more than an hour, Sacred Heart staff kept her alive by doing constant chest compressions to maintain blood flow to vital organs. A minister warned Lynn’s family and friends to prepare themselves for the worst.

“I just kept praying, saying to the Lord … please let her live because she had the baby. Emma needed her Mom,” Lynn recalls. “We saw them take her down the hall to the Operating Room. They had a nurse on top of her doing CPR as they were running her to the OR. I didn’t know if that was the last time I would see her alive or not.”

In the O.R., heart surgeon Dr. James Lonquist recommended implantation of a heart assist device that had never been used before at Sacred Heart as her only realistic chance for survival. During a seven-hour surgery, Dr. Lonquist and the open heart team connected a mechanical blood pump and specially designed tubing to her heart. The heart assist device works to drain blood from the heart and then ejects blood back into the body. The external pump, in effect, took over the work of Alison’s dying heart, buying her precious time.

Alison’s odds were slim even with the surgery – her lungs were full of fluid, and she was bleeding profusely because she had been on blood thinners prior to surgery.

“None of us was optimistic about her chances,” recalls Bert Rickles, a member of the open heart surgery team. But thanks to the skills of the surgical team and ICU staff, the heart assist device worked. To survive, she needed help from all over the hospital. Medications were rushed from the pharmacy. An amazing 55 units of blood products were brought from the hospital’s blood bank for rapid transfusions.

“Everybody just pulled together to do whatever needed to be done,” said Hella Ewing, ICU manager. “It was an intensive, incredible effort on the part of a lot of staff working a lot of extra hours.”

Still, there were other problems to overcome. One issue was that Alison did not have health insurance. At Sacred Heart, care has always been provided regardless of the patient’s ability to pay, but not many hospitals would take an uninsured patient barely surviving on a heart assist device.
Sacred Heart had done all that it could, and now time was running short to get Alison to a hospital that performed heart transplants. Fortunately, after three hospitals turned her down, Tampa General Hospital agreed to accept her. Sacred Heart staff then worked quickly to find an air ambulance jet from Birmingham that was qualified to transfer a patient with a heart assist device.

Two days after her surgery at Sacred Heart, Alison flew to Tampa. A month later, she underwent heart transplant surgery and is now making a steady recovery.

In a recent interview from Tampa, Alison expressed her gratitude to all who helped save her life. “If it wasn’t for Sacred Heart, I wouldn’t have made it down here, period. It was a combination of the nurses, the doctors, everybody.”

To have the heart assist device there at the exact moment when she needed it was miraculous too, she said. “If it wasn’t for that, and then flying me down here, I wouldn’t be here with my baby,” she said. “If they had turned me away because of insurance reasons, I wouldn’t be here. The fact they accept people without health insurance helps so many people, so many more than just me.”