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Hart County man receives life-saving heart pump
About 6 million Americans are living with congestive heart failure. James Craft of Hartwell is one of them. Doctors told Craft his best option was a heart pump, and that decision ended up saving his life.
Atlanta - James Craft said he was visiting his daughter Jasmine and granddaughter Aleina in Atlanta when he started feeling run down in 2019. He blamed it on the long hours he spends on his feet at his retail job.
"The tiredness was just a part of my life and what I was doing," Craft said. "So, I didn't recognize it was actually a lack of energy because of my heart."
But by the summer of 2021, Craft was in the hospital being told the left side of his heart, which supplies blood to the rest of his body, was failing.
"They told me the left ventricle wasn't agreeing with the rest of the heart," Craft said. "That's your main chamber, which basically takes the blood in to your body. My ventricle was operating at less than 10%."
Craft was in end-stage heart failure, leaving him with 2 options: A heart transplant or a heart pump known as a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD.
"I was eligible for a new heart as far as the the the way I was and the way it was operating," he said.
But because Craft was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, which could complicate a transplant, his doctors wanted to go with the LVAD.
That would involve surgically implanting a battery-operated, continuous flow mechanical pump to help Craft's left ventricle pump blood to the rest of his body.
Craft was hesitant.
"I was not understanding, and I was against it," he recalled. "I got with my daughter and my sisters and, you know, telling them the situation, and they actually said, ‘Go forth with it.’"
Dr. Ezequiel Molina, surgical director of the LVAD and heart transplant program at Piedmont Heart Institute, said about 3,000 patients receive an LVAD each year in the US.
"People in general, they've heard about heart pumps or artificial hearts, but … most people don't really know what an LVAD is," Molina said.
He said both the pump technology and the surgery to put in the pump have come a long way in the last 20 years.
"Most patients kind of start rehabilitation much earlier, and they can get out of the hospital earlier," Molina said.
The device can be used either as a bridge to a heart transplant, or a long term "destination" therapy.
"And, we're managing, now, these pumps in a way where the survival has improved from only a year or two years, on average, to now up to a six-year average," Dr. Molina said.
James Craft is about 18 months out from his surgery, and has no regrets.
"LVAD, the way I am, the way I'm living, I would have actually jumped for it, knowing what I know today," Craft said.