Electric heart

Janna Kintzley was a healthy 35-year-old mom of three returning from a day of shopping when she suffered a massive heart attack.

Three months later, her young daughters call her “electric mommy.”

A mechanical pump now beats in her chest, and doctors hope it will buy time while her own cardiac function returns. If that happens, Kintzley could avoid a heart transplant.

“We’re hoping,” says Dr. Timothy Icenogle, the Sacred Heart Medical Center cardiologist who implanted Kintzley’s mechanical heart. “The hope is that the device has allowed her own heart to recover. It would give her a longer life than with a heart transplant.”

But she faces long odds. Only two out of roughly 190 people nationwide with the same device as Kintzley have recovered once the pump was removed, according to Todd Seiger, transplant business manager at Sacred Heart.

Given the nature of Kintzley’s heart trouble — a spontaneous coronary artery dissection versus a chronic condition — doctors are more optimistic about her chances for recovery.

“It can happen,” Icenogle says.

For now, though, Kintzley and her family wait. She has an appointment scheduled for next week to see how well her heart functions on its own.

“We just don’t know the extent of what my heart is capable of,” she says. “I’m scared, but I’m anxious.”

Says her husband, Keith: “It really determines where we’re going.”

The Kintzleys are now living just a few blocks from the hospital. They’ve enrolled their two school-age children at Roosevelt Elementary School. But their home is in Oak Harbor, Wash., on Whidbey Island.

Keith Kintzley is a Navy pilot who was due to head to Iraq less than a month after his wife got sick. Janna jokes that she did this on purpose, just so her husband wouldn’t go off to war.

Mechanical hearts have come a long way since 1982, when Seattle dentist Barney Clark received the first permanently implantable artificial one. He lived for only a few months, tethered to a large machine in a Utah hospital.

Over the years, the devices have gotten smaller and quieter.

Kintzley received the HeartMate II Left Ventricular Assist System. The device is not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but it is the only one available that will fit in a small woman or child, Icenogle says.

So far, seven people have received the HeartMate II in Spokane, Seiger says. Two of those patients have died. The remaining five still have the mechanical heart and have not received a transplant.

Sacred Heart surgeons have been implanting mechanical hearts since 1990, using about six different devices. Over the years, 85 patients have received mechanical hearts while awaiting transplants. Sixteen of those patients died.

The average patient at Sacred Heart lives with a mechanical heart for 177 days before transplant, but one patient waited 1,377 days and had three different devices before getting a heart transplant.

Kintzley’s device is implanted in her chest, and a wire runs outside her abdomen and connects to an external system controller and battery, which she wears in a blue fanny pack. It is silent. Since the machine does not pump the same way as her heart, she has almost no discernable pulse.

When she’s sleeping, she charges the batteries and plugs the device into an electrical power base.

She gets winded easily and takes medication to minimize the pain of the device rubbing against her abdomen.

She is not allowed to drive. And she can’t take baths. But she’s been out to lunch. Outdoors with her kids. To the mall for ice cream.

“It’s definitely an inconvenience,” she says. “(But) this is my salvation until we know what’s going to happen.”

No one knows why Kintzley had a heart attack so suddenly.

She had just had a physical. Driving back from the grocery store on Feb. 19, though, she started blacking out.

As she pulled into her driveway, her hands tightened on the steering wheel. She couldn’t walk. She honked to get her husband’s attention, and her 8-year-old called 911.

An ambulance rushed her to the hospital in Oak Harbor, where she was diagnosed with a panic attack and sent home with Valium. It’s now believed she suffered a minor heart attack that day.

Three days later, after returning home from shopping with a friend, all of the symptoms came back. She took the Valium, but that did nothing.

“The last thing I remember was seeing Keith’s face over me,” she says.

She was flown to Bellingham and had a heart catheterization and appeared stable. But then her condition started going downhill fast.

Markers in her blood showed that her organs were beginning to fail.

Doctors, familiar with and confident in the cardiac programs in Spokane, had her flown to Spokane. But her condition kept deteriorating. Her oxygen levels dropped.

“They really wanted her heart to come back on its own,” Keith says.

But the mechanical heart was the only option. She received it on Feb. 28.

She was sedated for more than a week before she was awake and coherent enough to be told that her heart was no longer beating on its own.

She took the news well, her husband says.

“I’m just happy to be here,” she says.