Woman Battles Family History of Heart Disease
“We’re just good-hearted people with bad hearts.”

Valentine’s Day of 2001 found June Christian lying on a table in St. Luke’s Catheterization Lab. She had been waiting for this day a long time – the day she was finally going to have a chance to receive some experimental drug-coated stents to open her coronary arteries during a balloon angioplasty procedure. It was a day filled with as much dread as hope.

It was exactly a year before, on Valentine’s Day, when June’s father died. Although he succumbed to cancer, he also had heart disease. The year before that, near the same time, June’s mother died from complications following an angioplasty.

“After my mother’s experience, I was really scared to have the angioplasty done,” says June, who was concerned by the relatively high rate of in-stent restenosis (reblockage of a stent used to keep an artery open after angioplasty). “After Mama, I learned that you don’t keep going into the heart unless you absolutely have to – and the less invasive, the better.”

June received a rude introduction to the ravages of heart disease several years ago, when her younger brother, at age 32, suddenly collapsed and died. The cause was later found to be a ruptured heart valve.

“His wife was a nurse and she started CPR immediately, but he was gone. His heart just exploded,” reflects June, adding, “We’re just good-hearted people with bad hearts.”

In addition to the loss of her parents, June had been struggling with her own heart health for the past few years. Her symptoms began at age 40 when she experienced a racing heart. Her friend, a paramedic, insisted on taking her to an emergency room but she was told it was nothing to worry about. Still the symptoms persisted and became worse.

“I could be doing nothing and then suddenly be short of breath, have a rapid heart rate, and break out in a cool sweat. Sometimes it would last just a few minutes, sometimes as long as 15 minutes,” explains June.

June’s doctors could never pinpoint the cause of her symptoms and she started to blame herself.

“Was it just stress? Was it this or that? The low point was when I failed a treadmill stress test,” she says, now able to laugh about the experience. “Yes, you really can flunk that test.”

By the time she sought the help of Emerson Perin, M.D., cardiologist and director of New Cardiovascular Interventional Technology at the Texas Heart Institute, the news was both frightening and encouraging. June had two coronary artery blockages, one 65 percent blocked and the other 45 percent. The situation was complicated by the fact that June has diabetes.

“My arteries are small. Dr. Perin told me about this new drug-coated stent that was being studied elsewhere in the world and showed promising results. He thought I would be a perfect candidate for the stent – when it was approved for study in the United States,” says June.

A significant issue for June to consider was the fact that the clinical trial was a randomized, double-blind study. That means neither June nor Perin would know if she would actually receive the drug-coated stent or a bare-metal stent until the study was over. June opted to wait for a chance at the new stents, but the waiting game was fraught with many hospitalizations for her heart condition.

“There was even a time when I was discharged in the morning and was back in the emergency room that night. I got to know the ER staff so well that one fellow there even brought me homemade tamales,” laughs June. “Between the hospitalizations and waiting for the stent, Dr. Perin and I have become real good friends.”

Even though patient enrollment for the study is complete, the long-term patient follow-up continues. It will be some time before either June or Perin know with absolute certainty which stents she actually received. Based on June’s success, Perin can only infer that she did receive the coated stents, especially considering how tiny her arteries are.

Now, two years since her Valentine’s Day procedure, June says she’s had no problems. In fact, her heart is performing so well that June decided to share it. On a recent September evening, under a full moon, June married her fiance Ricky Caldwell on the Kemah Boardwalk, where they first met.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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