Leona Mason’s journey started with a sudden, unbearable pain in her chest.
Ordinarily, the 82-year-old grandmother is pretty tough and very independent – she has a car but says she prefers to walk everywhere. But when the pain hit, Mason said, “I knew I had to have help.”
Getting that help took Mason from her Holyoke home to a Greeley hospital this spring. A day later, she was on a helicopter, heading to Denver for surgery so unusual doctors didn’t even have all the tools they needed to perform it.
What the surgical team did have was a rare, perhaps once-in-a-career kind of opportunity to both break medical ground and, they hoped, save a life.
When he first got the call, Dr. Maurice Lyons thought his colleague in Greeley must be mistaken – a patient with a torn aorta couldn’t possibly still be alive.
“‘I know that, and you know that,”‘ Lyons recalls the colleague, Dr. Ken Richards, telling him. “‘But she’s sitting here with a blood pressure of 110.”‘
Mason had an aneurysm that had ruptured and torn her aorta, the main artery that directs blood from the heart to other parts of the body.
And somehow, she was alive.
Doctors often see patients with abdominal aneurysms and tears. They have approved, tested procedures for repairing them and saving patients’ lives.
Not so with tears so close to the heart.
“Usually, after seven or eight beats of the heart, they are dead,” Lyons said.
Over the phone, Lyons told Richards he would operate. Richards relayed the news to Mason, who, still alert, agreed, knowing the procedure would include improvisation.
“I was just in their hands,” she said.
Besides, with her son a doctor and her daughter a nurse, Mason said she has confidence in the medical profession.
After that, Mason doesn’t remember much, except the bumpy helicopter ride from Greeley.
“I mean it was rough,” she said.
When Mason arrived at St. Joseph Hospital, her blood pressure had dropped to 60/40 and she had lost consciousness.
“She was spiraling. She was dying,” Lyons said.
Hospital staff raced her into an operating room, where the surgical crew was waiting with an array of makeshift and jury-rigged equipment.
“We did this kind of off-label,” said Dr. Joseph Krysl, a radiologist who also treated Mason.
Krysl had to borrow pieces of equipment from Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center next door.
To get the four stents they would need to rebuild Mason’s artery, the surgical team had to get creative, Lyons said.
They had no choice.
“There currently are no FDA-approved thoracic grafts,” Krysl said.
There’s little use for them, he explained, because the likelihood is virtually nil of a patient surviving a chest aneurysm long enough to get into the operating room.
“We had to use junk we had lying around,” he said.
It all worked. After a few days, Mason went home.
Recently, she came back to St. Joseph for a checkup and a chance to chat with the doctors who saved her life.
“This was a big case. To see her as well as she is is remarkable,” Lyons said.
Mason is grateful – and making the most of the time she has left.
“The Lord has got a job for me, or I wouldn’t be here,” she said.
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-820-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
