Innovative Surgery Boosts Heart Patients’ Quality of Life at SBUMC

For a guy with no pulse, Arthur Plowden sure is lively.

The Amityville resident hasn't had a true heartbeat in a year, but it hasn't stopped him from fishing or shooting hoops or chasing his 2-year-old grandson. He has more energy than he's had in years, he said, after doctors at Stony Brook University Medical Center implanted an LVAD in his heart last April to avert congestive heart failure and buy him enough time to await a heart transplant.

Plowden's LVAD surgery was the first at Stony Brook, and since then, five more patients have had the procedure – all without complication, according to their surgeon, Dr. Allison McLarty.

"It's stressful on the one hand because they're very ill going into the procedure," said McLarty, a Setauket resident. "This device literally transforms them from very sick to very stable."

“VAD” stands for ventricular assist device, which, when implanted, takes over the blood-pumping function of the left ventricle – which is where the “L” comes from in “LVAD.” It causes his blood to flow through his veins in a continual stream, so he lacks a traditional heartbeat. The device is battery-powered, which requires Plowden to plug into a power source at night and wear an external battery pack during the day. The battery pack weighs about 12 pounds and slings around his shoulder in the way some women carry purses – so that’s what he jokingly compares it to.

A few fellow LVAD patients recently joined Plowden at the hospital to celebrate the anniversary of his procedure. While they all reported improvements in their quality of life, they will all eventually need heart transplants, said Dr. Hal Skopicki, who serves as the hospital’s co-director of the VAD Program and director of the Heart Failure Program.

According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the national heart donor registry typically has as many as 3,000 people on a given day. But each year, only about 2,000 donor hearts become available. Depending on a patient’s condition and blood type, wait times for a donor heart vary from several days to several months, according to the institute.

“But you take a look at these guys,” Skopicki said. “All of these people were literally in a hospital bed on life support with medications keeping them alive.”

The LVAD surgery is a procedure which Skopicki and McLarty helped test during a five-year clinical trial period at Columbia University. The early ventricular assist devices were so large they couldn’t be implanted in a patient’s chest, Skopicki said, so they were placed in the abdominal cavity instead. But now, the device is more compact – like the size and shape of a small horseshoe – and can fit in the chest.

SBUMC says its VAD Program, which earned national accreditation from the Joint Commission this past March, is the only one of its kind on Long Island.

“It’s good to see people up and moving and feeling so much better,” said Susan Neikens, 63, of Mastic Beach. Neikens, a retired nurse, is considering having the LVAD surgery to help improve her mobility.

“I want to keep up with my nine grandchildren,” she said.

Kind of like Plowden, who says his quality of life is now a “9.5 on a scale of 10.” His energy level is high, his appetite is back, and he has returned to work in the field of landscape planning and design.

“This brought me back,” he said.