From Despair to Triumph: An Inspiring Battle Against Pulmonary Hypertension

Maria Jennings is not where she thought she would be seven years ago. Instead, she is where she wants to be – living out her dream of reuniting with her family in Panama.

“She was on the verge of death,” says Cleveland Clinic in Florida Pulmonologist Roger Alvarez, DO, of his first meeting with Maria seven years ago. 

She had been dealing with fainting episodes, shortness of breath and numbness in her arm for about four years. One day, she felt she needed air and walked out of her house only to faint in the street.

“When I woke up, I saw the doctor, my husband crying, and the doctor told me I had been gone for like a minute and a half,” Maria says.

Dr. Alvarez and his team diagnosed Maria with a subtype of pulmonary hypertension called chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH). This disease is a rare and potentially fatal form of elevated blood pressure in the lungs.

Juan Pablo Umana, MD, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Cleveland Clinic in Florida, says Maria had had multiple episodes of blood clots from the veins in her legs moving into her lungs, obstructing the blood flow there.

The best treatment for CTEPH is a complex and challenging surgery called pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE). Dr. Alvarez referred Maria to one of the few centers in the country that was performing PTEs at that time. Maria was, however, told there that she could not be a candidate for the surgery.

She considered going into hospice care because the only other option she had been offered was a lung transplant.

Dr. Umana says that when the team at Cleveland Clinic in Florida reviewed Maria’s angiogram with the team at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, they found that her disease was very amenable to surgical intervention because of the locations of the blockages in the pulmonary arteries.

“Only a few centers in the world do (the PTE) because it is very labor intensive,” Dr. Umana says. “It requires a full organization behind it and that is what we have at Cleveland Clinic not only in Florida but obviously in Ohio and it is the collaboration between the two that makes it possible to have optimal results with these very complex operations.”

“We were able to finally offer her that procedure that she had always hoped that she could have,” Dr. Alvarez says.

After having the surgery Maria says she now feels “great.”

“I’m really super happy, super grateful because I have my own lungs, my own heart.

I am fine now. I feel good,” she says.

Maria is now building a house in Panama so she can spend more time with her grandchildren, something she wasn’t able to do before because of her condition.

“I have strength I didn’t expect to have,” she says. “I walk more. I don’t get so tired anymore. I am happy. The one who cried before now laughs.”