Chapters Transcript Video Sherri Merchant Heart Surgery Patient Story I'm Sherry Merchant, and I'm a special education teacher. That's a passion that I love more than anything. When I was 12, I had strep that settled in my brain. I had to learn how to write and pretty much walk and everything all over when I was 13. And my journey just started from there with medical issues. F2 and platelets I don't produce, so those two work together and so my blood doesn't clot. A couple of years ago, I had real bad anemia. I couldn't walk without almost passing out. Everything in my body was shutting down. All of a sudden, it was just tremendous pains in my abdomen, and we got to the hospital and I'd lost like 5 L of blood and my ports became infected. And then that's when they found the infection in my heart. And that's what damaged my valves. And so they referred me here, and that's where my journey started at UT Southwestern. She was still bleeding when she came to us, and the treatment that we started was able to stop the bleeding. She had been just recently told that she was not a candidate for cardiac surgery, and she wanted to live and wanted to get better, and we just had to do our job and help support her through it. Don't lose hope. And that was the one thing that Doctor Hyde gave me and all the staff and everybody, and they treated you more like a friend and they went above and beyond. Her surgery would be no different than any other mitral valve surgery. The more important thing would be managing her ability to form blood clots in the perioperative setting. It was all of the stuff put together, the fact I had lupus, I have kidney disease, I have epilepsy, I had the heart murmur. It was all of it combined. I reached out to Dr. Shin. We looked into the literature and had seen no other reports of patients with this condition having cardiac surgery, but with the expertise of our hematology and anesthesia doctors, we were able to come up with a plan for a way of improving her factor II levels to allow for cardiac surgery. To get her to surgery, we had to use the plasma exchange procedure. Because of that, she was able to undergo surgery without any bleeding concerns. She had an excellent outcome. We were able to replace her mitral valve, and she's back to work and living a normal life, and that's a tremendous reward for us and our team. Rare diseases really require a multidisciplinary approach. In the DFW area, UT Southwestern is the only academic center with national recognition. We have the expertise to deal with this. We've actually published this as a first case report in the literature of doing cardiac surgery in somebody with this condition. My passion in life is my special needs students. What scared me more than anything is that being taken away from me, but now I'm able to do my job and do it well, and I'm beyond grateful for that. Created by
