He Quickly Recovered from Heart Surgery

Two days after Larry Sherman began having chest pain, he underwent triple-bypass surgery at Lehigh Valley Hospital. The very next day he was walking, and three days later he went home. Within two weeks, Sherman was healthy enough to walk two miles. “I never thought I’d be up and around so quickly,” the 65-year-old Kempton, Pa., man says.

There are many reasons why heart surgery patients today can recover so fast, says Sherman’s surgeon, Theodore Phillips, M.D. Bypass patients like Sherman benefit from the growing skills of the surgical team. “More than half a million heart surgeries are performed in the United States every year,” Phillips says. “With more experience and better technology, we’re simply getting better at what we do.”

That means patients are under anesthesia and on the heart-lung machine for shorter periods. The heart is better protected during the time it is stopped. And the incision needed to extract a healthy vein from the leg (to bypass the non-working heart artery) has shrunk from 20 to 3 inches. “Smaller incisions are less painful and prone to infection, and they take far less time to heal,” Phillips says.

At Lehigh Valley Hospital, most bypass patients are home in four days.

The newest approach to correcting heart-related problems is minimally invasive surgery—and patients eligible for this kind of procedure often go home even more quickly. Surgeons correct problems like irregular heartbeat using instruments inserted through very small incisions, and there’s no need for a heart-lung machine.

Another factor in getting heart patients up and about is education. “When patients know exactly what’s going to happen and what milestones they need to accomplish, they work to attain them,” Phillips says.

Go to a cardiac rehabilitation center and you’ll see that take-charge attitude. “Years ago, patients would lie in bed for days,” says cardiac rehab nurse Michele Saladyga, R.N. “Many would lose their strength or develop breathing or circulation problems because they weren’t moving around.” Before today’s patients even leave the hospital, they’re doing arm, leg and breathing exercises and walking six times a day.

After discharge from the hospital, they come to an outpatient rehab center three times a week. “They begin doing 25 minutes of continuous exercise, and in six weeks most of them advance to 45 minutes,” says Darlene Garon, clinical exercise physiologist. Staff
members watch patients’ vital signs as they use a treadmill, stationary bike, rowing machine, stair climber or dumbbells. “Because we’re monitoring them, we can push them to work harder,” Phillips says. “When they’re exercising at home on their own, they only need to do a little more each day.”

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