Miracle Man

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 Health for emergency surgery to fix an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm, and he had less than an hour to live.

“When I got to Kaweah Health, 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 Health, was the surgeon on-call that fateful night. “When I saw his CT scans, I called Kaweah Health 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 Health’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 Health, 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 Health, 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 Health.”