You can't talk to Doug Childs for long without discovering his great love for basketball.
For as long as Doug can remember, his life has revolved around basketball—playing it, coaching it, and watching it. But in the fall of 2000, Doug developed a health condition that threatened to rob that love from his life. In fact, it was while playing basketball that this condition became apparent.
“I was doing some pre-season conditioning at a basketball camp for boys and girls,” Doug explains. “Between sessions, I was playing one-on-one with a young lady and I suddenly felt really faint. I had to go down on one knee.”
The episode passed. But just a few days later, Doug was doing a short jog on the football field and the same thing happened again. He called his family doctor, then went in for an EKG. That examination revealed that Doug had atrial fibrillation, a condition in which one or both of the heart's upper chambers—the atriums—sometimes flutter or quiver, instead of beating as they should.
Doug's doctor referred him to a cardiologist who prescribed medications for his condition. But the episodes of atrial fibrillation continued, leaving Doug dizzy, light-headed and fatigued.
As a person who had always led an active, healthy life, this development was particularly disturbing to Doug. He had coached boys' varsity basketball at Greece Arcadia high school for 19 years. He had played on senior basketball teams that had won New York's Empire State Games several times. Basketball was at the very center of his life. |
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What's more, his atrial fibrillations threatened far more serious problems. Without a strong heartbeat to send blood from the atrium to the ventricle, blood tends to pool in the atrium. This can cause clotting, which can then lead to a stroke. So when Doug went into A-fib, as it is called for short, he needed to get out of it as soon as possible. There were two way to do this: Taking more medications, an option that Doug hoped to avoid. Or being cardioverted—having his heart shocked back to its normal rhythm.
“I think I set the record for the number of times someone has been cardioverted,” Doug says. Whenever he went into atrial fibrillation, he had 48 hours in which he could go to the hospital for this procedure. He would be anesthetized, then have paddles attached to his chest. “Just like you see on TV,” Doug says. He received this treatment a total of 17 times. And each time, it would take a couple of days for Doug to recover.
Gradually, more and more things would send Doug's heart into atrial fibrillation. “I couldn't have caffeine, so no coffee or Diet Pepsi—and I loved them! Then one day, ice water sent me into A-fib.” But the worst was yet to come.
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In the fall of 2005, exercise itself started triggering atrial fibrillation. So Doug had to drop out of his basketball league—ruining his hopes of taking his team to the Empire State Games to complete for the gold medal again. “That was the kicker for me,” Doug recalls.
By that time, Doug had done significant research on his condition. He had determined that he needed an EP cardiologist—a cardiologist who specializes in electrophysiology, or heart rhythm. He had found that person in Dr. Mark Hammer.
“Hammer did an interesting thing,” Doug says. “He didn't tell me what to do. He said, ‘Why don't you go over to Strong and explore this procedure. See if you're interested.' So I did. ”
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The procedure Doug explored is called an ablation, and he learned about it from Dr. Burr Hall at the Strong Heart & Vascular Center. Dr. Hall explained to him how in a normal heart, an electrical impulse travels in an orderly fashion through the heart muscle, causing it to beat normally. What happens in patients with atrial fibrillation is similar to a short circuit. The heart's electrical signal gets caught in a loop, causing the heart to quiver instead of beat. An ablation eliminates the short circuit by creating a new channel for the heart's electrical signal to travel through.
The ablation was scheduled for December 22, 2005, a date that was chosen with plenty of forethought. “I was coaching middle school basketball at Arcadia, so I scheduled the procedure while the kids were on break so it didn't interrupt coaching.” With Doug under partial anesthesia, a catheter was inserted into his femoral artery and fed up to his heart.
For Dr. Hall to see the electrical patterns causing the problems, Doug needed to be in atrial fibrillation at the time of the procedure. Some patients are given adrenaline to induce the condition, but Doug was actually in A-fib already. Over the course of four hours, Dr. Hall studied the electrical patterns in Doug's heart, then he used the catheter to systematically create microscopic burns in the muscle of Doug's heart. These burns created a tiny system of scar tissue that redirected the electrical impulses in Doug's heart, gradually eliminating the fibrillations.
“I was home the next day, and I had a slight soreness in my chest for a week or so,” Doug recalls. “They kept me on the meds for about 3 months. But now, I don't take anything. The episodes have completely stopped.” Doug has nothing but admiration for Strong, and for Dr. Burr Hall. “You know, he's a young guy. If I had seen him in the hallway when I was teaching high school, I would have asked him for a pass! But he's number one in my book of heroes.”
“I've resumed my normal life,” Doug says. “I don't have fear anymore. The fear of going into atrial fibrillation if you have a drink of caffeinated coffee or play basketball or go for a jog.”
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And that lack of fear has meant something huge for Doug: A return to the game he loves. On June 10, 2006—not quite 6 months after his ablation procedure—Doug played on the team that won the gold medal in the Empire State Games 60+ division. That qualifies his team for the Nationals in 2007.
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