King of Hearts
Originally published, BayouLife Magazine
February 2016
Over the course of the last 40 years, technological advances in healthcare have meant fewer patients undergoing radical surgeries with high risks and long recoveries. Few of those innovations have touched as many lives as the extraordinary and innovative work of Dr. Terry King.
article by Michael DeVault | photography by Brad Arender
On the morning of April 8, 1975, Suzette Creppel was going through the final motions of surgical prep. For the first seventeen years of her life, Creppel had lived with an atrial-septal defect, a potentially lethal condition in which an individual is born with a hole between the chambers of their heart.
Since a young age, Creppel had known surgery was in her future, though she was fearful of what that would look like. In 1975, repairing an atrial-septal defect required a wildly invasive surgery in which cardiologists opened the sternum, placed the patient on a heart-lung bypass machine, stopped the patient’s heart, and then opened the heart to sew closed the defect. Even in the best cases, the procedure resulted in a months-long recovery process and a gnarly scar from just below the clavicle to below the sternum, one that patients bore for the rest of their lives. In the worst case, patients could die from the procedure or from any of a host of post-surgical complications. Sitting in the cold, bright facility, Creppel remembers her emotions well.
“I was nervous, terrified,” Creppel tells BayouLife. Perhaps it’s a natural part of the human condition. It is the only emotion appropriate when faced with an unknown, in which one of the possible outcomes is uniquely terminal. Yet, she mustered her courage and forged ahead.
With a final signature on a consent form, Creppel and her parents consigned the situation to fate, though in this particular instance, the tools of fate were two physicians at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans. Crowded around a single operating table in the hospital’s heart catheter lab, nurses, technicians and a myriad of other assistants busied themselves with the order of the day – a first-ever attempt at medical history. After all, just a couple of years before, the younger of the two men had been called insane for even suggesting such a procedure could be attempted, much less completed successfully. And now, at just 38, he would deploy a never-tested device in a human patient. The stakes were astronomically high.