Six months ago, Sam Einsidler lay on an operating table as doctors raced against time to repair his torn aorta.
If they had opened his chest, the way aorta-repair operations were conducted for the last 40 years, the 18-year-old from West Friendship might have died from other injuries that weakened his lungs, doctors said, or he could have been paralyzed.
“If he had to have open-heart surgery, with the damage to the lung, he might not have been able to tolerate the heart/lung bypass,” said Dr. David Neschis, one of the vascular surgeons at the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center who operated on Einsidler.
Instead, Neschis said, theyinserted four tube-shaped endografts through a catheter in his leg, buttressing the damaged aorta and allowing it to heal.
It would be five weeks before Einsidler could remember the details his father Neal told him about the car accident in which he was injured, or grasp how long he had been incapacitated.
“We always believed that we would get him back. We just didn?t know what all the implications were,” Neal Einsidler said. “Those were early dark days.”
Einsidler also had a broken femur, which allowed fat particles into his blood stream, damaging his lungs and his brain, Neschis said.
“Without this surgery, we don?t even know, with all the other complications, whether he would have lived,” his mother, Terri Einsidler, said.
The traumatic internal pressures generated by an automobile accident can tear the aorta, the body?s main artery, away from the rib cage. Neschis, along with chief physician Thomas Scalea, and Dr. Bartley Griffith, chief of cardiac surgery, successfully repaired torn aortas in 26 patients over two years.
They published a record of these surgeries in the March edition of the Journal of Vascular Surgery. Four patients subsequently died from other injuries, while one other patient was not a good candidate for the so-called endovascular repair.
Einsidler hopes to return to his predental studies at Howard Community College in the fall.
“Some of it?s been difficult, but you just keep plugging away,” he said. “You have your life back, but you have to keep working at it.”
