An anonymous $1 million donation from a recent patient in the Advanced Aortic Program in the University of Colorado Department of Surgery will enable the creation of resources to better support patients undergoing and recovering from surgery for aortic disease.
“This patient has gone through three surgical repairs and is four years out from her recovery, and we still see her once a year for surveillance,” says Elizabeth Devine, PA-C, MS, a physician assistant in the Advanced Aortic Program. “She was able to give us a lot of great feedback on her personal experiences and the successes and struggles of her recovery — things she felt may have benefited her.
“She wanted to implement support within our existing program for us to conduct more outreach, education, and support for patients with extensive aortic disease,” Devine continues. “More support for their mental health throughout their recovery and afterward, as well as more education and resources. Those are some of the projects we're working on, thanks to her generous donation.”
Different from heart disease, aortic disease involves aneurysms, splits, or tears in the aorta, the largest artery in the body. Surgery can address acute problems, and non-emergent surgical repairs can help to prevent future issues.
It can be a difficult disease process for patients to manage, says T. Brett Reece, MD, director of the Advanced Aortic Program, because the surgeries are intense and the recovery can be long.
“There's not a great community resource for these patients as they're recovering,” says Reece, professor of cardiothoracic surgery. “Nobody knows what it's like to go through these operations, other than the patients. We want to find out how we can help them in their recovery over the first couple of weeks, which is really hard, because their endurance is terrible. From a psychological standpoint, I think there's a huge amount of PTSD that comes along with a lot of these operations.”
The operations often have other implications for patients and their families, Reece says, including genetic, social, and financial aspects. The new donation will help the aortic program set up programs to address these needs.
“Insurance isn’t going to pay us to counsel the patients, but if we can free up some FTE time, or even recruit patients to help each other, that's a big deal,” he says. “We have patients who want to have children who want to know, ‘What’s it like afterward? What does it mean with this diagnosis? Are there ways to prevent my kids from getting it?’”
The aortic program is uniquely situated to help patients long-term due to the nature of the disease process and the wide range of people it affects, Devine says.
“These patients are with us essentially forever, even after we've repaired their aorta, and they truly become like family to us,” she says. “And this disease process doesn't just affect people in their 60s and 70s and 80s — we have patients from their teens through 80 and 90 years old. Being able to address and take care of the physical and emotional aspects of this disease process, and also having a complex multidisciplinary team that can provide top-notch care — that’s what we're building here.”
The $1 million donation will help in that effort, Reece says, and it’s all the more meaningful that the gift came from a patient attuned to the needs of others like her.
“We're going to continue to use her as a resource as we move forward,” he says. “It also opened my mind to asking the patients, ‘What is it that you need? What are we not addressing that we can do better?’ It's changed our approach significantly. We're not shying away from those conversations; we're really jumping into them.”
Adding elements to help patients with the mental and emotional aspects of their recovery will only serve to make an already-stellar aortic program even better, Reece adds.
“We have the premier aortic program in the region, if not the western United States. We are known nationally,” he says. “We have been building that over the past 15 years, but now we're starting to push the edge of what care for aortic patients looks like. I'll do that in the operating room with the techniques we can work to evolve, and Beth and her team are now doing it from a different angle that we've never really approached before. That will be so important for our patients going forward, and it will have an even bigger impact on the well-being of our patients than what I can do in the operating room.
“These are huge operations that we're doing, and they can have huge physical, mental, and emotional effects,” he continues. “We need to really push into the emotional part of it in terms of helping their recovery. This gift is something that will assist us in being able to do that.”