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In This Issue:
Wanda Santana and Eileen Tye, president of the Ray Tye Medical Aid Foundation and widow of Ray Tye.
Catheter ablations are common at BWH—physicians here perform approximately 1,000 per year—but the circumstances surrounding 30-year-old Wanda Santana’s procedure in August were far from routine.
Santana, a mother of three, came to Boston from the Dominican Republic in hopes of receiving treatment for the debilitating headaches and episodes of rapid heartbeat she has suffered her entire life.
In 2008, she met Charlie Pavolis, a Worcester attorney who traveled to the Dominican Republic to deliver toys to an orphanage. She started working for him as a translator; it was during that time that she asked him to feel her heart.
“She said to me, ‘Can you feel this?’” Pavolis said. “It seemed like 100 miles per hour. It was pounding. All of a sudden, the heart would speed up like someone pushed the gas pedal.”
Treatment for Santana’s condition, Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome, was not available to her in the Dominican Republic. Pavolis contacted the Boston-based Ray Tye Medical Aid Foundation, which generously offered to cover Santana’s medical bills and coordinate the logistics and details with BWH for her surgery.
“I was very impressed with how smooth the whole process was and with how supportive the Ray Tye Foundation has been,” said Bruce Koplan, MD, the BWH cardiologist who performed Santana’s procedure. “What we were treating was, for the most part, not a life-threatening condition. But in Wanda’s case, it was dramatically life-altering.”
Wolf-Parkinson-White Syndrome is caused by an extra piece of heart muscle tissue, present at birth, that disrupts the heart’s electrical system.
“Wanda’s EKG findings indicated she had this syndrome, but we found during the surgery that she actually had more than one of these abnormal pathways,” said Koplan. “Her case ended up being a little more complex than we thought, and we essentially performed two catheter ablations.”
Two months after her surgery, Santana is preparing to return to her home in the Dominican Republic, where she is in her second year of medical school. The village in which she lives has just five hours of electricity per day. She walks a mile uphill to catch her bus to school in Santiago, and when she returns to her home in the evening, she studies by candlelight.
“She comes from a place that is so dramatically different from what we are used to in Boston,” said Koplan. “To be a part of this program that enables her to receive the care that we’re accustomed to in the U.S. is very rewarding.”
Santana is not yet sure what type of medicine she will specialize in, but is leaning toward pediatrics or obstetrics. And while she still has a few years to go before she becomes a doctor, Pavolis said that Santana has already started paying forward the generosity of which she herself is a recipient.
“She had hair that went down her back when I met her,” he said. “Through her university, she found out about a program to donate hair to children with cancer, and she cut off a whole lifetime’s worth of long hair.”
Santana said she didn’t have to think twice before donating her locks.
“I want to help people, the same way that everyone here helped me,” she said. “I’m so grateful for this new beginning. I can enjoy life.”