Stories and Discoveries

When Lauren Sanford was 18 weeks pregnant, doctors discovered that her baby, Oliver, had Pierre Robin sequence. Confronted with this rare condition which can cause facial abnormalities and breathing complications at birth, she and her husband Josh Setten, were unsure what to expect for both his delivery and his future.

UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s were able to offer the couple support and a collaborative team of 30 surgeons, nurses and specialists who would need to perform ex-utero intrapartum treatment (EXIT) mid-birth led by Drs. Edith Cheng & Shani Delaney. For this rare (and risky) procedure, Oliver’s birth by cesarean delivery was paused, and he was intubated through the nose while still connected to the placenta.

As the only team in the region able to perform this procedure, they were determined to usher Oliver safely into the world — and they succeeded. Currently hitting all his milestones, Oliver will eventually need surgeries for his jaw, cleft palate and airway, but in the meantime, his future is bright.

There’s clearly something amiss when it comes to diagnosing Black women with endometrial cancer — their mortality rates after diagnosis are 90% higher than rates for white women.

Enter Dr. Kemi Doll, a gynecologic oncologist with the UW Medicine. Her study research illuminated how a common method of screening for endometrial cancer, which measures endometrial thickness, is not racially equitable and often misses signs of cancer in Black women, causing them to be diagnosed at later stages.

Clinicians are now more aware that Black women with fibroids may need a biopsy — and not just screening — to rule out endometrial cancer.

A heart procedure that only takes 30 minutes and allows the patient to go home that same day? Sounds unlikely, but Drs. James McCabe and Zachary Steinberg, cardiologists at the UW Medicine Heart Institute, just did that for patient Tim Holland.  

Using a special catheter-delivered retrieval device, they cut out Holland's benign heart tumor with electrocautery and then removed it — the first time that this unique procedure was performed successfully. It gives McCabe and Steinberg hope that more patients can take advantage of this minimally invasive approach, avoiding surgery and speeding recovery times.

"If it becomes clear that this procedure is reproducible and safe and relatively straightforward, then maybe it makes sense to remove the tissue by catheter instead of anxiously waiting for the tumor to grow large enough to create a problem,” says McCabe.

While driving his Route 75 bus in the Lake City neighborhood of Seattle, Eric Stark suddenly found himself face to face with a man standing in the middle of the road — pointing a gun at him. He heard the gun fire and saw the windshield break. Then he felt the bullet enter his chest.

Stark’s first instinct after being shot was to protect his passengers, so he threw his 40-foot bus into reverse and drove it to safety. But Stark needed immediate medical attention. He was transported to Harborview Medical Center. His care team quickly worked to stop the bleeding and tend to his other injuries: a shattered rib and sporadic nerve pain.

Stark, who’s been driving King County Metro buses since 2012, made a successful recovery and is back in the driver’s seat on Route 75.

One day, Marilyn Wightman noticed she was short of breath for no apparent reason. Shortly after, she fainted.

The cause: Wightman is one of the less than 1% of people who develop blood clots in the lungs from birth control shots. Her doctors at University of Washington Medical Center – Montlake put her on blood thinners. Then she learned she was a small fraction of those who develop a life-threatening response to the clots. Without surgery, she had a 10% chance of living five years.

To save her life, Dr. Michael Mulligan removed 15 clots from Wightman’s lungs. First, he had to raise her oxygen level, lower her temperature, stop her heart and drain her blood. Then, he carefully teased out the clots, which were surrounded by wafer-thin blood vessels.

The surgery was a success, and Wightman is feeling like herself again.

Six-year-old Josh went for a boat ride on Hood Canal with his dad. The idyllic summer evening — complete with sherbet skies and glassy water — quickly took a turn. The driver lost control of the boat and Josh was thrown into the water. His right arm was badly wounded, and before he knew it, he was airlifted to Harborview Medical Center. Before surgery, he was told they may have to amputate his arm.

A team of pediatric trauma specialists operated for 16 hours straight, and when Josh awoke after surgery, he found out that the doctors fought against all odds to save his arm.

Over two decades later, Josh is an avid rock climber who uses that right arm to pull his entire body up sheer rock faces hundreds of feet off the ground.

What started out as a typical summer day out on the water suddenly turned into a life-threatening situation for Lily James.

James was boating on Lake Washington with her friends and family when the wind lifted an inflatable inner tube that was tied to a rope. Without notice, the rope caught her legs and abruptly pulled her overboard, nearly severing her left foot and leaving her right foot hanging by a tendon. James was rushed to Harborview Medical Center, where surgeons quickly worked to save her feet.

Doctors weren’t sure if James would ever walk again, but 11 years and over 20 surgeries later, she’s back to playing sports and doing what she loves.

Confined to a dark room due to splitting headaches, double vision and a loud whooshing sound in her ears, Michelle Catchot knew something was terribly wrong.

The problems appeared suddenly and didn’t let up. Catchot, who is from California, flew to Harborview Medical Center, where Dr. Michael Levitt of the UW Medicine Neurosciences Institute placed a stent in Catchot’s brain to relieve the fluid buildup caused by a condition called Pseudotumor Cerebri. Harborview was the only hospital on the West Coast offering this rare procedure.

Years later, Catchot has made a full recovery and is back to what she loves: making wine and riding horses.

Ken Price waited his entire life to catch his breath. Then the transplant surgery team at University of Washington Medical Center helped him breathe easy — for the first time ever.

Cystic fibrosis caused breathing problems for Price since childhood, but after he received the first-ever double-lung transplant at University of Washington Medical Center, his condition quickly improved. Within four weeks of transplant he was getting active again and has since completed many bike races and a marathon, even completing the Seattle-to-Portland bike event in a single day.

More than 25 years post-transplant, Price is still going strong.

Myra Gaines was running out of options — and time. The 87-year-old’s artificial heart valve was failing, but her condition was too grave to endure open-heart surgery to have it replaced. Doctors worried if they tried, she wouldn’t survive.

Enter Dr. Danny Dvir, an internationally recognized cardiologist at the Heart Institute. Dvir and his team performed a first-of-its-kind procedure allowing him to safely operate on Gaines. During the 2.5-hour surgery, doctors used a catheter threaded through Gaines’ veins to reach her heart and cut the old valve before implanting a new one.

Before her surgery, taking a short trip to the store would leave Gaines exhausted. Now she’s back to doing chores and walking around her neighborhood four times a day.

In 1995, a patient told Dr. Teri Brentnall he was worried about developing pancreatic cancer because his father, grandfather and three uncles had all died from the disease. She was touched by her patient’s story and that had unforeseen impact: It led Brentnall to discover a genetic link to familial pancreatic cancer.

To help her patient and discover why so many members of his family developed this often-fatal disease, Brentnall and her colleagues created a surveillance program and compared DNA samples between those who did and did not have pancreatic pre-cancer. After a decade of research, they found that the family members with pancreatic pre-cancer also had a mutated form of the Palladin gene.

Brentnall’s work has widespread effects: She saved her patient, and many in his family, from getting pancreatic cancer and revolutionized how programs screen for this type of cancer across the world.