Local woman receives simple but life-changing heart procedure from TriStar Greenview doctor

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – After one simple procedure, one local woman who went to TriStar Greenview Regional Hospital has her heart back to normal once again.

Meet Terry Langford, who’s been with her husband Steve for 46 years. Back in June, she started having these heart problems.

“She came in with very low blood pressures and her heart rate being very, very fast. So at that time we saw her and she had a lot of shortness of breath as well… and then we found that based on the EKG, we were suspicious for a blood clot in her lungs. So we did a bedside echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound of the heart that confirmed that there was a lot of strain on the right side of the heart, which communicates with the lungs… and so we knew that we were dealing with a big problem,” Dr. Roshan K. Mathew, an interventional cardiologist with TriStar Greenview’s Centennial Heart, says.

That problem brought her to Greenview, where one simple procedure from Dr. Mathew and his team changed everything.

“We did a CT scan that confirmed that she had massive amounts of blood clots in her lungs and that her low blood pressure and her heart rate was because of the pressure exerted from those blood clots… and so then we took her to the cardiac catheterization laboratory, confirmed the presence of the blood clots… and then we were able to suck out those blood clots very quickly… and within about 10 minutes of doing the procedure, she started feeling 100% better. The following day, she was actually requesting that she go home. She was feeling 100% better, she was doing really well,” Dr. Mathew says.

After that emergency surgery, Terry is now recovering at home, and Dr. Mathew says cases like hers are a testament to the standard they try to uphold at Centennial Heart.

“We are able to provide these kind of services because HCA and Centennial Heart and Greenview Hospital, the administration itself is so supportive of us providing that kind of care. So that means we’re able to elevate cardiac care in this region, and that’s what our goal is at Centennial Heart,” he says.