Patricia Schroder

At age 72, Patricia Schroder has been exploring the woodlands around her home with renewed vigor, thanks to recent heart surgery at Mayo Clinic. "I hike in the forest or on the road around the lake and I don't have to stand by the neighbor's fence and pant for breath," she notes with satisfaction.

Schroder's heart problem stems from when she was 3 years old and suffered a severe case of scarlet fever, which developed into rheumatic fever. At that time, rheumatic fever was more common because there was not yet widespread use of the antibiotic penicillin. Rheumatic fever frequently causes heart damage by weakening the mitral valve, which connects the heart's upper-left chamber (left atrium) to the lower-left chamber (left ventricle).

Schroder never knew her heart had been affected. "I didn't realize when I was growing up that everybody doesn't black out when they stand up." When she had an appendectomy at age 12, doctors discovered Schroder had a heart murmur but she didn't receive any treatment at that time.

It wasn't until she was 39 that Schroder sensed a health problem. She and her husband were living in Moorhead, Minn., the parents of five children. Schroder felt she was losing her energy. "It got to where I couldn't even wash the dishes without laying down." Her intuition was her heart condition was the underlying problem.

Schroder was convinced Mayo Clinic was the only place to go for care. Her father had been successfully treated for polio at Mayo Clinic and this had made a strong impression on her as a teen. Schroder left her husband and five children in Moorhead and took the bus to Rochester to be evaluated. Within days, she was having open heart surgery. Mayo surgeons replaced Schroder's defective mitral valve with a mechanical valve. The treatment allowed Schroder to return to her busy life and sustained her heart for years.

In 2003, at age 70, Schroder started experiencing breathlessness and extreme fatigue. She returned to Mayo for surgery to replace the artificial heart valve that she received at age 39. Less than a year later, she began having severe headaches, and she returned to Mayo. Testing showed that while her mechanical valve was working fine, a hole had developed in the scar tissue around the valve, allowing blood to leak backwards around the valve whenever her heart pumped.

Schroder's primary cardiologist Dr. Scott Wright was concerned about the impact another open-heart surgery would have on her health, so he consulted with Drs. Allison Cabalka and Donald Hagler, Mayo Clinic cardiologists who specialize in a minimally invasive surgical procedure that offers an alternative to open-heart surgery.

"The effect of the hole in Mrs. Schroeder's heart was that, over time, she was physically weakened, so the risk of surgery was high," says Dr. Cabalka. "But clearly, the hole needed to be closed. We decided the best option would be to repair the heart defect with a catheter-based device that could close the hole without the need for another open-heart surgery."

Schroder is climbing higher than ever after her heart repair.

Drs. Cabalka and Hagler and their medical team threaded a thin tube (catheter) through Schroder's blood vessels into her heart and inserted a specially designed plug into the hole. "Once we had the plug in place, it took a matter of minutes for the device to seal the hole and stop the leaking around her heart valve," says Dr.Cabalka.

Afterward, Schroder felt better immediately. "It wasn't even like I had to recover from surgery. I was walking from building to building at Saint Marys Hospital within a day or two."

Since her return home, Schroder says she is breathing easier and feeling stronger than ever before. On a hike in Colorado with her husband, she climbed to a higher altitude than she had ever been before, and had her husband take a snapshot of her. On a recent trip to visit their daughter in China, they traveled to Tibet in the Himalaya Mountains, at altitudes of 14,500 feet.

"It's delightful. Now, I can do more than any time that I can remember in my life," Schroder says. "I have really been amazed. Just to have breath is so different."