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Repairing a Blistered Heart
Vietnam Veteran Douglas Sims
Vietnam Veteran Douglas Sims
Sometime during the turmoil of Super Storm Sandy, Vietnam Veteran Douglas Sims experienced an enormous, devastating heart attack. It is unusual that he felt no pain, something that might have brought him more quickly to the Emergency Department. There, he would have received medication to limit the effects of the heart attack. But, looking back on the sequence of events that occurred on October 29, 2012, Monday morning quarterbacking is meaningless.

Sims and his wife live in Coney Island in a two story condo they love. A man of many interests, Sims is a Russian scholar and for two decades, he and his wife operated a successful school in Brighton Beach to teach immigrants English. After he retired, Sims began a demanding book project describing the development of cartography in 16th Century Europe. He believes the stress of bringing the project to completion impacted his medical crisis.

Admittedly, in the period before the storm and flooding, Sims was already very stressed. Then, the storm hit. Having thought there was no need to evacuate, the Sims were shocked when their entire first floor rapidly started flooding. “I told my wife to put the towels away, she wasn’t going to stop the water and we should run upstairs.” The ocean water was coming in so quickly that that the Sims barely had enough time to grab some cans of food, and a can opener and make it up to the second level. Thinking he would make one more trip to the kitchen to gather some more supplies, Sims rushed downstairs again. “Now, the water was up to my chest," he recalled. “Furniture was floating around." Somehow their large, very heavy refrigerator had become dislodged and trapped Sims’ leg.

His wife came down wading into the high water to help her husband. In the course of an hour and a half, they hauled the refrigerator into a position that allowed Sims to move freely. The couple went back up the stairs. Once there, “we opened a bottle of wine to celebrate being alive," said Sims.

When he finally came to VA New York Harbor’s Brooklyn campus on November 1, the logistics were complicated. “It appeared that he had had a massive heart attack," said Dr. Eugene Grossi, who before the storm, was based in Manhattan. Here was a patient who would need evaluation and surgery.

In the first weeks after his heart attack, Sims could not go right in for surgery because “VA wanted to be sure he had a place to go home to – since his home was gone,” explained Dr. Grossi. Once New York City social services placed the couple in a comfortable hotel in Sunset Park, surgery was scheduled. By this time, the highly specialized cardiac team of physicians, OR and ICU nurses, and Critical Care team that is usually based in Manhattan and serves as a regional referral center, were set to perform a cardiac reconstruction at Brooklyn. This is a procedure that Dr. Grossi has researched and described in many publications over the years.

As Dr. Grossi explains it, the kind of heart attack Sims experienced was on the front part of the left ventricle. This means 50 percent of his heart was affected, swollen to double its size. “It’s like a large blister that prevents the heart from functioning adequately,” Dr. Grossi explained. “We remodeled the heart by placing a small patch near the remaining normal part of the heart and then folded and secured the now useless tissue onto the heart itself. Once the heart was aligned, and the extra tension required to deal with the swollen part was removed, the heart could pump normally.”

“It was absolutely miraculous what Dr. Grossi did," said Sims who is now recovering very well.