After three years of dealing with a debilitating heart condition, Kristiana Rigney of North Carolina found a solution halfway across the country in Johnson County.
The 20-year-old underwent a complex and rare form of heart surgery at Overland Park Regional Medical Center in April.
Rigney is the youngest patient in the United States to receive the procedure and the hospital is the first in the region to perform it.
Finding help: Rigney’s journey with sinus tachycardia — an abnormally fast heart rate — began after she noticed a pattern of feeling out of breath three years ago.
“I could feel my heart pounding out of my chest,” she said. “Unfortunately, I did have to drop out of school because of it because I couldn’t focus and I wasn’t sleeping, so it had a huge effect on my life.”
She saw a cardiologist and physicians in three different states before the Mayo Clinic identified the surgery she needed. But they would not perform it.
Then her mother, Jennifer Rigney, found Dr. DJ Lakkireddy, a cardiologist and medical director at Overland Park Regional. He and Dr. Ahmed Romeya determined Rigney to be a candidate for the surgery.
For Jennifer Rigney, finally finding answers after what had been a complex journey was emotional.
“It really has been life-changing,” she said. “(Kristiana) just happens to have a lot of strength and fortitude to be able to handle that, but I could see how it could shut down people’s lives completely.”
Kristiana Rigney underwent a consultation in late March, and the Rigneys arrived in Kansas City on April 18. The surgery took place on April 21.
Rigney was discharged from the hospital eight days later, and since then, she said she’s grateful for the recovery.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve walked upstairs and been able to breathe,” she said. “Even a flight of stairs would jack it up to 180-190 (beats per minute) and it was just so impossible to catch my breath. So it was an incredible feeling to walk up the stairs and be fine.”
Bigger picture: Rigney’s condition, sinus tachycardia, is a rare one.
Lakkireddy said it impacts just 1% of the population and primarily impacts young women.
“It inappropriately raises your heart rate as if you’re running a marathon (when you’re) sitting down, lying down, reading a book,” he said. “As a result of which, what people end up doing is progressively stop doing the things that they like the most. So, you are mostly bed-bound.”
In the last few decades, Lakkireddy said this condition has been treated by various medications but none of them produced optimal results. When patients did undergo surgery for it, it often led to complications.
The surgery he and Dr. Romeya performed involves approaching the heart with two small tubes. Overland Park Regional Medical Center is one of only four in the United States to perform the procedure.
“When we do that procedure, we basically eliminate all these other triggers so that the only place where the heartbeat is coming from is from the sinus node,” said Dr. Romeya “So we go through with a minimal invasive technique and we do three little holes that are just enough for a pencil to go through.”
Lakkireddy said for physicians like him and Romeya, getting to see how procedures like this impact patients is the highest reward they can get.
“It’s wonderful to see young people who suffer from this and whose lives are completely changed upside down, getting the benefit of actually having part of their life back,” he said. “As physicians, for us, there’s no better reward than our patients getting better.”
