Something was terribly wrong with Eddie. In the darkness of a rainy December
night, the pain radiated through his body with the fury of a lightning
strike. What began as simple back pain had turned into shocks of agony
traveling through his body like electricity. Eddie’s family rushed
him to the nearest emergency room where a CT scan delivered terrifying
news: Eddie’s aorta, the major blood vessel carrying blood from
your heart to your body, had ruptured. Eddie needed to be transferred
to Kaweah Delta for emergency surgery to fix an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm,
and he had less than an hour to live.
“When I got to Kaweah Delta, they swarmed me,” Eddie remembers.
“I could hear Dr. Hamdi delivering orders like a drill sergeant.
He told me they were going to do everything possible to save me.”
Dr. AbdulRahman Hamdi, a vascular surgeon with South Valley Vascular, a
physician group affiliated with Kaweah Delta, was the surgeon on-call
that fateful night. “When I saw his CT scans, I called Kaweah Delta
immediately to prep the team for Eddie’s arrival,” said Dr.
Hamdi. “He was bleeding out from the inside and we needed to get
him to the operating room as soon as possible.”
The operating room Dr. Hamdi needed prepped isn’t your typical operating
room. To save Eddie’s life, Dr. Hamdi needed to perform surgery
in Kaweah Delta’s state-of-the-art Hybrid Surgical Suite. “You
cannot do the procedure Eddie needed in standard operating rooms,”
explained Dr. Hamdi. “In cases like Eddie’s, you already have
the cards stacked against you. Not having a hybrid room makes surgery
much more labor intensive. You’re not going to perform at the level
you need to save people’s lives. The hybrid surgical suite is what
opens the door to performing the kind of procedures we couldn’t
do before.”
Dr. Hamdi continued. “If we didn’t have the resources, equipment,
and physicians at Kaweah Delta, Eddie would have been sent to Fresno or
Stanford and he wouldn’t have made it. Time is of the essence and
Eddie didn’t have 30-40 minutes to wait. He would have died in transport.
We had the right team, the right tools, and access to the hybrid suite
to save Eddie’s life.”
Eddie survived a health crisis few people live to talk about, and he believes
his mother in heaven and Dr. Hamdi are who kept him alive. “God
gave me the courage to face my difficulties but without Dr. Hamdi and
Kaweah Delta, my life wouldn’t have been restored,” shared
Eddie. “My mother was watching over me and now Dr. Hamdi calls me
his ‘miracle man.’ I feel reborn and owe my life to Kaweah
Delta.”