A New York girl born with a fatal heart condition had her life saved by a cardiologist… now she’s teaming up with him to save others

A New York girl, born with a fatal heart defect, now trains under the guidance of the cardiologist who helped save her life as a child.

Ariana Azeez of Chester, New York, was born with a hole in the wall separating the two upper chambers of her heart, which allows dangerous blood flow between the right side and the left side.

The condition, which in some cases can cause problems such as high blood pressure and even heart failure, was caught early thanks to a team of pediatric cardiologists who were able to diagnose and repair the life-threatening defect.

Now Ms. Azeez, 17 and a high school senior, is working with Dr. Eric Fethke, hoping to follow his path and save the lives of kids like her.

Ms Azeez said: ‘He’s one of my favorite doctors I’ve ever had because something I picked up on and was from a young age, he’s very interactive and engaging when he’s in the room with you (as a patient). . he loves his job.

“He actually has whiteboards in every room. He draws a diagram of a heart and he points out the certain parts that need to be fixed and he teaches, like a little crash course on what’s going on. So for me, when he did, I thought it was really interesting and I enjoyed learning about it.”

Her physician-turned-supervisor, Dr. Fethke, is a pediatric cardiologist who specializes in fetal heart disease and congenital birth defects in his private practice in Middletown, New York.

He has long been a core member of Ms. Azeez’s medical care team. Although he didn’t perform her life-saving surgery when she was 11 months old, he treated her in monthly and then annual follow-up appointments from her first birthday until about two years ago.

Just a few months after she was born in the Bronx, Ms. Azeez was examined by a doctor who was troubled by what he heard through his stethoscope.

The whooshing he heard, caused by turbulent blood flow through the heart, signaled to him that Ariana had a heart murmur and an irregular heartbeat, known as an arrhythmia.

After running several tests, doctors diagnosed Ms. Azeez with an atrial septal defect (ASD), a congenital defect that causes a hole in the wall between the heart’s upper chambers, or atria.

In a healthy heart, the right and left sides are separated by the atrial septum, which prevents the mixing of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood.

DOxygenated blood, or blood that has been deoxygenated, flows into the right side of the heart and later through the pulmonary artery, delivering it to the lungs to be re-oxygenated.

The oxygenated blood is then returned to the left side of the heart via pulmonary veins. The heart then pumps this blood through the aortic valve into the body’s main artery, called the aorta.

The oxygenated blood then flows to organs and tissues throughout the body.

Babies in the womb have an opening between their atria before they are born that allows blood to bypass the lungs before they are fully developed.

This is because oxygenated blood flows from the mother’s placenta to the baby’s body and is pumped by the heart to the rest of the body.

Normally, the hole closes once the baby is born and exposed to oxygen. But in people with ASD, that hole remains in the wall that separates the two upper chambers of the heart, allowing the oxygenated and deoxygenated blood to mix.

While blood is still flowing normally in someone with ASD, some of the blood is diverted through the hole, allowing additional blood to flow from the left side of the heart to the right side.

This means that part of the blood that is supposed to carry oxygen to the organs and tissues of the body does not do so as effectively. It can also overload the right side of the heart and lungs.

The condition prevented Ms Azeez from breastfeeding and she was placed on a feeding tube inserted through her nose for eight months.

While the condition may be benign, in Ms. Azeez’s case, the doctors decided they had no choice but to surgically repair her heart defect.

They planned to operate when she was 12 months old and 10 pounds, but decided when she was 11 months old and only eight pounds, her condition was serious enough that they couldn’t afford to wait.

Mrs. Azeez said, “Mine was very big. It was a large flap, like an opening in the atrial wall. And so they had to seal that because it prevented me from breastfeeding properly and I also had trouble breathing.”

During the surgical procedure, the doctors temporarily stopped her heart so they could directly access the faulty atrial septum that separated the two atria. The large ‘flap’ in her heart was sewn shut and her heart restarted, returning blood flow to normal.

Ariana’s recovery was rapid, with just one day in intensive care. But she had to go to cardiologists like Dr. Fethke monthly for much of her life to make sure the surgery had fixed the problem for good.

Now it has come full circle and Ms. Azeez spends a few hours a week during the summers observing consultations with Dr. Fethke and investigating diagnostic tests such as echocardiograms, which use sound waves to produce a real-time representation of the heart.

Years of regular checkups with a team of doctors, including her current boss, sparked her interest in the study of the heart, although her interest in medicine doesn’t stop there.

She is also interested in studying psychology and neurology in college in addition to cardiology, with hopes of treating children in the future.

Now, deep into the college application process (her top picks include New York University and Columbia University), Ms. Azeez envisions herself pursuing a medical major, specializing in pediatric cardiology, psychology, and neurology or oncology.

She told DailyMail.com, “Dr. Fethke not only taught me about my condition, but he also talked about other (conditions).

“So I realized that, okay, this is interesting because it happened in me, but there are a lot of other similar conditions with the heart that are also very interesting. And from there I became really interested in all things heart related.”