A heart patient who died is able to give the gift of life.In this case the recipient of that gift is a four-legged friend.
Pacemaker implants have become fairly common procedures at Queen's Medical Center. Hundreds of them are done every month. When a heart patient died recently, Dr. Lee Guertler, a cardiologist, and other medical staff at Queen's, decided to get more use from the patient's pacemaker.
"We happened to think that this is a fairly recent pacemaker it's got over a ten year shelf life and we know that in other countries they ex-plant pacemakers and give them to the indigent, Canada, Indonesia, China,” he said.
But in the U.S., the FDA doesn't recommend ex-planting or taking out a pacemaker and re-using it on another human patient. But there are no rules against re-using a pacemaker on an animal.
"So for the first time in Hawaii we ex-planted a pacemaker, took the leeds out, and we donated it to the veterinary society and the vets are very happy to have it,” said Dr. Guertler.
Dr. Guertler says the patient's family was notified and they approved. Queen's Medical Center Risk Management also liked the idea of giving animals like dogs and cats a new lease on life.
"Animals don't get coronary artery disease so that's really not an issue for them but they have other conditions that cause them to have heart block,” he said.
Pacemakers are given to patients with heart disease and provide an electrical impulse that can speed up or slow down the patient's heart rate. Dr. Guertler says the device is small enough, that it can be implanted on a dog as small as a pomeranian and as large as a Great Dane. Pacemakers are built to last at least ten years. As a proud owner of five dogs, Dr. Guertler is sharing this story to let other pacemaker users out there know that they too can give the gift of life.
"It's an amazing amount of resource, everybody has different beliefs but this was something that was given to the patient surgically and if the family says fine, he wasn't born with it, we'll give it back, that will be lovely,” he said.
