lvad article

Heart-felt thanks

By KRISTIN BUEHNER, [email protected]


CLEAR LAKE — Loren Toomsen is quick to tell you he’d be pushing up daisies if it weren’t for the experimental heart device that gave him a second chance.

“Thanks to the doctors, I went from a sentence of death to a great, wonderful lease on life in the future,” the 65-year-old Clear Lake man said.

Toomsen received a battery-operated Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD) in July as a participant in a Food and Drug Administration trial.

The device is a third-generation LVAD called Ventracore. Manufactured in Australia, it involves freely floating rotors in the blood and has very few mechanical parts to wear out.

The Ventracore has been in use abroad for several years.

Jerome “Jake” Nickell, 70, of Rockford, is also using the Ventracore. Nickell was, in fact, the first person in the Midwest enlisted in the Minneapolis Ventracore trial study in November 2006.

Toomsen was number 13.

“I had all the symptoms of heart failure but didn’t know it,” Toomsen said. “My toes were turning black and purple from wanting blood. I was short of breath and didn’t have any energy.”

His wake-up call came in late April when it took him 15 minutes to climb a flight of stairs in his split-level home. His Clear Lake physician told him to check into the emergency room at Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa at once.

The problem was a low-functioning left ventricle, the chamber of the heart that pumps blood out into the body.

After draining 15 pounds of fluid from his heart, the doctors told Toomsen one of three things would happen: His condition would get better, stay the same or get worse.

For Toomsen, things got worse. By July 3, he was so miserable, he called Mercy-North Iowa again.

“I told them I hadn’t slept three nights in a row, was there anything they could do,” he said.

On July 5, Toomsen had an early-morning MRI performed. Within half an hour, Mason City cardiologists Dr. Gino Zadeii and Dr. Sam Congello were in his room.

“They just point-blank said to me, you have end-phase congestive heart failure. There’s nothing more we can do for you.”

Zadeii told him he was sending him to the University of Minnesota Medical Center where an FDA study was being conducted to determine the viability of a new LVAD device, the Ventracore.

The Medical Center was one of 24 in the nation participating in the FDA study.

Zadeii had already called for a helicopter to transport Toomsen to Minneapolis.

Toomsen was met at the University Medical Center by a team of five doctors, including lead physician Dr. Andrew Boyle.

Three days later, he underwent an implant at the Fairview Transplant Center.

Released from the hospital Aug. 6, Toomsen now wears a wide black Velcro belt across his middle and carries a 7-pound case bearing a controller, a computer attached by an electrical cord to his heart. The case also contains extra batteries.

The batteries must be recharged every three hours. Toomsen’s wife, Bobbi, who underwent a week of special training, assists him with everything, including changing his sterile dressing every 24 hours.

Toomsen calls his controller R2-D2. His back-up computer in a separate case is C-3PO. He jokingly refers to himself as the Bionic Man.

His controller, which is tuned specifically for Toomsen’s heart, keeps his heart pumping. Toomsen records daily and weekly the readings on the controller.

“I can’t go boating, take a bath, go fishing, swim or ride a bicycle,” he said.

He cannot take the chance of falling and breaking his controller.

Toomsen’s greatest fear is children and dogs, which can separate the electrical cord hooked to his heart from his computer. “If they rip this out, I am dead,” he said.

He is feeling stronger every day now and is looking forward to the rest of his life.

Toomsen is termed a “bridge” patient, for whom the LVAD is temporary, pending a heart transplant. He must lose some more weight and take more time to heal before he’s a candidate for a new heart.

Nickell is termed a “destination” patient. He will live with the LVAD device the rest of his life. No one knows how long the device will last.

“I thought that was probably the only way I’d stay alive,” he said, smiling good-naturedly at his home. “And so far I’ve been pretty thankful I’ve got it.”

He feels 100 percent better than he did before undergoing the implant operation, Nickell said.

A retired electronics specialist who formerly lived in Des Moines, Nickell had suffered from congestive heart failure for many years and had had two heart attacks.

When he and his wife, Sharon, moved to Rockford in 2005, he went to see Zadeii, who ran some tests.

“He wanted me to go to Minneapolis to Dr. Boyle,” he said. “When I arrived at Minneapolis, they gave me two weeks to live.”

Nickell went in to Fairview Transplant Center Nov. 14. The surgery was performed Nov. 17 and lasted 13½ hours.

On Dec. 26, 2006, he was sent to coronary intensive care to drain a massive amount of fluid build-up around his heart.

“We were there (Minneapolis) for 10 weeks,” said Sharon.

For the first time in a long time, Nickell has a normal blood flow.

The Nickells are of the opinion that Jake got his LVAD so he could live. They take road trips without a second thought, having traveled to Kansas City and Nebraska. They also plan a trip to Texas.

“We take a charger and a plug-in to the wall so he can go on wall power at night,” said Sharon.

“We just thank God every day that Dr. Zadeii sent us up there,” she said.

LVADs are being continually improved and have been around since at least the 1990s, Congello said.

“They were developed for people with very weak hearts, people in need of a transplant. People were dying waiting.”

Between 300,000 and 800,000 people in the United States have end-stage heart failure, he said. “There aren’t enough hearts to go around.”

Congello anticipates the Ventracore device will be approved by the FDA for general use.

“Some day they’ll be better than transplants,” he said.