The 26-year-old woman brought to Erlanger Medical Center hours after she suffered a major stroke was at death’s door.
The right side of her face hung slack, and she could not speak. Her right arm and her right leg were paralyzed. She had only a 60 percent chance of surviving and, even if she did, odds were high that she would spend the rest of her life helpless, in a nursing home.
But today, thanks to a revolutionary non-surgical therapy known as the Mechanical Embolus Removal in Cerebral Ischemia (MERCI) that allowed doctors at Erlanger to remove a blood clot from an artery and restore blood flow to the young woman’s brain, she is back home with her children and well on her way to recovery.
That’s just one of the innovative medical technologies available at Erlanger that were described to President George W. Bush during his visit to the medical center on Wednesday, hospital officials said during a review session on the visit held Thursday morning.
Erlanger is one of only five hospitals in the nation where MERCI is available, they noted.
Watching videos of the woman taken soon after her arrival at Erlanger and then later, after her successful treatment, the president was “visibly moved,” recalled Dr. Thomas Devlin, a neurologist with Chattanooga Neurology Associates and medical director of the Southeastern Stroke Center at Erlanger.
Dr. Devlin and Dr. Blaise Baxter, an interventional neuroradiologist with Associates in Diagnostic Radiology, said the president was also intrigued by the Stroke Center’s innovative approach to making state-of-the-art technologies available to patients here long before health insurance begins covering them.
“We are in the launch phase of setting up Chattanooga Stroke Center as a non-profit,” Dr. Devlin explained.
As a nonprofit group of physicians, the Stroke Center could tap into philanthropies, the physicians said. That would mean that Erlanger would not be left eating the costs of such treatments during the two-year gap between the time that new devices come on the market and insurance companies begin covering such treatments.
The doctors said they also talked to the president about another treatment for brain injuries – laser therapy – that could used to treat troops injured in Iraq.
A generation ago, even the most influential individuals could be struck down by a stroke and there was little that medicine could do to help, CEO Jim Brexler commented.
“On the eve of President John Kennedy taking office his father, former Sen. Joseph P. Kennedy, had a major stroke,” the CEO recalled. “Joseph E. Kennedy lived on – with mind intact, but unable to feed himself, confined to his bed – for another 25 years.”
Now the kind of procedures offered at Erlanger mean that kind of suffering can be avoided not only by the rich and famous, but by ordinary citizens such as the 26-year-old stroke victim and her family.
“What these guys are doing, most physicians aren’t trained to do,” Brexler said, nodding toward Dr. Devlin and Dr. Baxter. “These guys do talks around the world on these procedures . . . But the pay-off for their being able to do them here at Erlanger does not come at the hospital site. The pay-off comes later, when the patient is healthy and able to hold down a job and live a productive life, rather than spending a lifetime in a nursing home.”