Patient Stories
These stories from Hopkins publications profile our efforts to treat patients with challenging, and often rare, health problems.
Cardiac Surgery
Realizing Excellent Outcomes in Heart Valve Repair
A month’s worth of intravenous antibiotics may have cured a serious blood infection, but the therapy left Michael Beer with a damaged heart valve...
A Bug’s Life
The 29-year-old attorney lost weight, energy, stamina and even her job, but doctors in Germany and Moscow had offered no more than a general diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome. When she came to Johns Hopkins, she was exhausted but hopeful…
Internal Medicine
The Brodsky Approach Saves a Life
Mark Strome felt like one lucky guy as he drove his silver Maserati toward his mother's birthday party in June 1999. Every financial publication had recently touted his skill in creating one of the world's most successful hedge funds. But on that June morning, the Los Angeles financier got the first signal that his future may have hit a roadblock a nosebleed that wouldn't stop…
For AS, at last, a Workable Treatment
Charles Gaskell was never a great golfer—he just loved playing the game. Then at 28 he was hit by the crippling spine disease ankylosing spondylitis (AS). As is typical, the condition struck Gaskell in early adulthood, inflaming the spine and peripheral joints so severely that eventually he couldn’t perform standard activities, let alone golf…
Interventional Radiology
Fibroid Removal without Surgery
These days, patients who question a physician's treatment plan regularly head for the Internet. Diana Gould-Riley is a case in point. When the Annapolis travel agency owner in her early 40s learned from her gynecologist that she'd need a hysterectomy to get rid of her fibroid tumors, she balked at the idea of having her uterus removed at her age. If she could possibly avoid surgery, she wanted to know…
One More Modern Miracle
When Alison Leiby of Severna Park, Md., needed back surgery for a herniated disc last summer, she sailed through the operation and figured she’d be back on the Cornell University crew team by fall. Then, at the end of July, she stood up and felt searing pain rip through her left leg, hip to toe. Within minutes, her entire limb had swelled and turned blue…
Unlocking the Mysteries of CNS Infections
The first symptoms were dizziness, vomiting and hiccups—she had them for nine straight days. Then came double vision, “pins-and-needles” pain, deteriorating motor skills, difficulty swallowing...
Reaming and Bolting the Spinal Cord
“It’s an easy operation, but very dangerous,” Don Long says of the procedure that he and his fellow neurosurgeon Ira Garonzik performed last spring on Judy Christmann’s neck…
When Age Isn’t the Problem
Old age didn't come gently to Iris D'Ari. By 79, her thinking had grown fuzzy, she suffered from incontinence, and her gait was so timorous and shuffling that she rarely ventured outside. Classic manifestations of aging, right? Wrong…
Belzberg Saves a Youthful Leg
Last April, two weeks into his tour in Iraq near the Syrian border, 23-year-old Derrick Goodrich was hit by a bullet from close range “They told me amputation and a prosthesis would make it easier for me to get around,” Goodrich says. But the young soldier wanted a second opinion…
Surgery can be the Solution to Too Much Pain
On Mother’s Day last year, Betty Berlin received a horrendous present—excruciating facial pain. Home alone, Berlin, 81, says she “danced and screamed for about 15 minutes,” until the anguish subsided. But the attack turned out to be no passing symptom…
Extracting Molly’s Brain Tumor
"Do you think Molly has a limp?" Kody Taylor asked her husband, Gary, as they watched their 3-year-old walking to the car. “Nah, it’s just the way she walks.” But when an orthopedist suggested Molly have an MRI, the South Carolina couple learned their daughter had a brainstem tumor…
Neurosurgery on the Pancreas
Unconvinced that the swelling in his patient’s foot had a vascular origin, Michael Fox’s physician ordered a CT scan to see if a lymph node abnormality might be the culprit. The lymph nodes appeared to be fine. But to the consternation of both doctors—Fox is a Colorado Springs radiologist—the imaging showed a 4-centimeter mass on the head of his pancreas...
Skull Base Surgery: When Smaller is Better
High school math teacher Sue Cheatham visited her ophthalmologist for a pre-Lasik consultation because she’d had enough of “vision like bad satellite dish TV, where bits would black out, then reappear.” Instead of suggesting Lasik, he sent her to a neuroophthalmologist, who said her disrupted lateral sight—bitemporal hemianopsia—signaled a brain tumor.
OB/Gyn
Ovarian Tumors that Are "In Between"
The growth on Stephanie Garagozzo’s ovary made its presence known four years ago when the internist had a routine ultrasound examination during her first pregnancy...
Oncology
The Best Thing I’ve Done in My Life
When Dawn Koehler's gynecologist in Lebanon, Pa., discovered a cyst on one of her ovaries, he asked for more information. Koehler, a 59-year-old nurse, had a family history of cancer, and her GYN wanted to know whether she, too, was at risk for developing a malignancy…
My Cousin Michael
In the autumn of 1999, a cancer patient named Michael Billig, a 43-year-old associate professor of anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., had chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and had just come through a two-and-a-half-month stem cell transplant to try to halt the life-threatening disease…
Taming the Beast
Kim Lohr calls Friday, Nov. 13, 1998, the blackest day she’s ever known. As she sat in the driveway of her sons’ after-school daycare center late that afternoon, an ominous red light on her dashboard warned that her car had overheated. With steam puffing from under the hood, Lohr slumped forward and moaned. What else could go wrong? Already that morning, she had learned that at 32, she had breast cancer…
Joint Solutions
For some knee repairs, it’s out with artificial and in with biological...
When Collaboration Saves Limbs
The caller got straight to the point "Hello Nurse Clark," he began. "My name is Jesse. I don't know whether or not you remember me, but I'll always remember you." To wound care specialist Amanda Clark, this was welcome news. Of course she remembered him—already paraplegic from a bullet to the spine, he'd been admitted a year ago with foot wounds so severe they threatened to take both legs...
Ball and Socket Switch Makes an Arm Work
With a single misstep on winter ice in 2003, Mary Boody crashed onto her shoulder and destroyed her right rotator cuff. Even after Boody underwent surgery to repair these vital muscles and tendons that stabilize the shoulder joint, followed by physical therapy, she remained in nonstop pain…
The Scoliosis Doctor
By the time Jaclyn Bower entered her teenage years, she was missing school weeks at a time. Scoliosis had induced such a severe curvature in her spine that standing erect for more than a few minutes had become unbearable. Then, two years ago, the teenager caught a break…
One New Shinbone Later
For three years at Glenelg High School in Maryland, Eric Elmer, the 6-foot-1-inch, 190-pound tight end on the football team, played every game in pain. The gnawing discomfort, which kept Elmer up at night and on Tylenol all day, stemmed not from a gridiron injury but from a pea-size growth on his shinbone...
Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery
Spare the Voice, to Avoid Spoiling the Singer
When our writer needed a thyroidectomy, she worried that her singing voice would suffer from the surgery. Even though the procedure is generally safe and effective, the risk of vocal damage can run as high as 8 percent, depending on the surgeon and institution…
Cancer Resection, Facial Reconstruction: Multidisciplinary Team Gets Patient Rocking Again
For 55-year-old musician and music teacher Paul Yutzy, Johns Hopkins surgeons Paul Flint, Patrick Byrne and Ralph Tufano rank right up there with Jimi Hendrix on the list of people who have changed his life...
A Life in Balance: SCD Causes Vertigo, Falls, but Surgery Corrects All
Richard Christian's life came unhinged with a belly laugh. In the fall of 2004, the Illinois high school teacher doubled over with laughter at a joke his son told. Then the athletically built 55-year-oldkept tilting forward until he collapsed...
A Minor Balancing Act
How one otolaryngologist found a way to set the world right for patients with a mysterious form of dizziness...
A Newscaster Rejoins the World
For more than a decade, Baltimore newscaster Bob Turk battled increasing deafness. At first, he managed with hearing aids. But by late 2004, even the most expensive models were failing him…
An operation No One Else Would Tackle
There are some cases that can make even a surgeon take a deep breath. Eighteen-month-old Maison Jackson was like that. When Anthony Tufaro, who specializes in head and neck surgery, first took a look at Maison last summer, the tumor on the toddler’s face had ballooned to the size of a softball and inched dangerously close to his left eye...
A Silver Bullet For Blake
By the time Blake Althaus was 2 months old, Anita and Joe Althaus found themselves facing a geneticist who delivered chilling news: Blake had a particularly severe and rapidly progressive form of Marfan syndrome and would die soon. They’d be lucky if he reached age 2...
Proving His Strength Before Ever Taking a Step
The doctor returned with bad news for Victoria Jensen: Her Baby had a congenital diaphragmatic hernia, a neonatal condition with a 40 percent to 50 percent mortality rate...
Amanda’s Operation: Not Bread and Butter
Ask Paul Colombani about the cases he operates on, and he'll tell you: We don't do a lot of bread-and-butter surgery here. More and more, our patients come for a last-ditch operation. Which could sound puzzling until this chief of pediatric surgery describes a case like 11-year-old Amanda Long's…
The Tiniest Transplant
Liver transplants "even on children" have been around awhile. But last year, when a two-week-old infant named Brady Johnson showed up at the Hospital weighing a little over five pounds and in liver failure, pediatric surgeon Henry Lau knew he was facing a different sort of challenge…
Split-Second Tragedy Leads to Life-Long Recovery
As Charlene Lawrence-Ryan waited on the side of the road for her husband to make a phone call, a driver crashed into her car, sending her spinning into the left lane. That instant changed the entire course of her life…
Like Something From Nothing
When the Humvee started to roll over during a high-speed turn near Iraq's border with Kuwait on the early afternoon of August 12, 2005 a piece of Michael Fletcher's top-mounted turret gun caught him in the face, impaling him beneath the heavy machine moments later...
No ‘Sleepless in Baltimore’
When Jill Leukhardt was an executive in a booming technology business a few years back, her bipolar II illness—which she didn’t know she had—dovetailed nicely with her job. Seven years ago, however, the disease caught up with her...
Planets Align to Allow Transplant
For the past three years, Everett Davis’ struggles with a rare blood disorder had made him a frequent visitor to Hopkins. But, one afternoon last February, his three-hour trek to Baltimore seemed to take twice as long. With his wife behind the wheel, the 32-year-old accountant rode most of the way from his Kingston, Pa., home in total silence, pondering the sudden news that the liver he desperately needed had been found...
Having a Blast, Despite Shattered Dreams
Vernon Gibbs dreamed of leaving York, Pa., to become a travel guide in Myrtle Beach, S.C., where the tourists abounded and the weather was warmer, and he could walk along the Atlantic Ocean. Then, in spring 2003, a diagnosis of prostate cancer ruined everything...
Removing a Horrendous Tumor
Even six weeks after exploratory surgery for cancer of the small intestine, John Hill was still vomiting and losing weight. When two close friends, one a surgeon, the other a radiologist recommended that he go to Johns Hopkins to be treated for his disease, John and his wife, Doris, drove from Buffalo, N.Y…
Incurable, Not Untreatable
No one knows what ignites the scleroderma fire, or who will develop kidney failure or lung disease. But when Nancy Bechtle learned she has the rare condition, she demanded the name of the finest doctor in the nation…
One Smart Surgeon Saves Two Lives
Omayma Ahmad checked into the Hopkins emergency department last September in a panic. Not only was she experiencing another bout of the gasping and piercing angina that had sent her into the operating room two years earlier for an aortic valve repair and put her on medication for the rest of her life, this time she was pregnant…
You Can’t Live Very Long Like That
By the time Josh Ober walked into the office of Hopkins gastroenterologist Mary Harris last April, he’d grown somewhat skeptical of doctors….
Thank You for Saving Mrs. Scopel
Rosemary Scopel has the sunny disposition one associates with an elementary school principal. She is, by her own admission, a ‘glass-is-half-full person.’ This year, that optimism was tested by the biggest crisis of her life…
Soft Shoulders
Denise McCreery came to in the front seat of her car, which was pressed against a guard rail on I-95 in Maryland. She was covered in fine bits of blue glass….
From Poor Odds to the Best Outcome
Everything seemed normal for J. Frederic Redslob, with the exception of a handful of a symptoms he never imagined to be major. So when he heard the word cancer, his world turned upside down.
A Crucial Save Helps Bypass Amputation
Joe Taschner was just a few hours away from losing his right leg. A 55-year-old father of two, he’d already undergone numerous surgeries because of his lifelong struggle with diabetes...
A Gentler Fix for Broken Aortas
It’s the sort of injury that smart trauma teams look for whenever they receive the survivors of a high-speed car crash. Though the patients’ broken bones might be instantly obvious, the deadliest culprit may lurk within—a torn aorta, either actively leaking blood into the chest or about to come apart. The complication typically propels surgeons into an urgent open-chest procedure...
A Ruptured Aneurysm in the Right Patient
Early last summer, Henrietta Bartecki felt the worst pain she'd ever known, “a terrible piercing on the right side of her abdomen. I wouldn't wish it on a dog,” she says…
Minus a Rib, an Athlete Becomes Whole Again
Jad Vonderheid first noticed the trouble in his right arm during his junior year at the University of Massachusetts. Vonderheid, a star swimmer for the Division I school, suddenly found himself with a limb that was swollen, painful and turning blue…
