Imagine you're on vacation in the Florida Keys, and days later, you're being rushed for emergency heart surgery in Miami. A woman thought she pulled a muscle, but what happened next, she's calling a medical miracle.
"Just the most miracle, crazy story in the whole world,” Mary Lou Davis said.
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WATCH HEREDavis was staying the winter in the Keys. She woke up one day with shoulder pain, thinking she pulled a muscle.
Fast forward – she was in an ambulance to Miami in need of heart surgery.
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"It's a miracle I'm alive. It was a very big blockage. And I didn't even know," she said. "That's what's weird, you don't even know that you could be dying any moment."
Davis had coronary artery disease and was on the verge of a heart attack. Thanks to a pioneering doctor and cutting-edge robotic technology at Baptist Health, she underwent bypass robotic surgery – without cracking open her chest.
"And I said, so wait, I'm going to be over here, but I saw Dr. Hashimoto standing across the room ...and they said, yeah, he's going to be over there at that computer, completely across the room, and you're going to be here on this bed having heart surgery," Davis recalled. "I don't even know enough to be amazed. I can't even fathom the shock of that."
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Dr. Makoto Hashimoto recently arrived at Baptist Health Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute from Japan to launch the new cardiac robotic program and serve as a professor at Florida International University. The procedure involved robots and just three small incisions.
"More surgeries will be performed. Cardiac surgeries will be performed this way. Yes, I think this is the future, and this is the way to go. The number of robotic cardiac surgery cases is now exponentially increasing around the world,” Dr. Hashimoto said.
Days later, Davis was back home with a new artery and a new outlook.
"Don't think a feeling, or something that you're not used to, is normal — because if you're not used to it, it's not normal. I almost didn't even go in for this. I did not feel like it was a heart thing,” she said.
Dr. Hashimoto told NBC6 that in the future, don’t be surprised to find remote surgeries – as in doctors operating on a patient all the way in another country.
