I’m so excited and so happy to be able to play my senior season,” Sara says. “‘Thank you’ doesn’t even scratch the surface of what I would like to convey to my doctors for what they have done for me and my family..”
Sarah Taffet, a 21-year-old softball player for the Fordham University Rams, was running out a routine ground ball during a tournament in Newark, New Jersey, when her opponent tagged her in the chest for the out.
She fell forward and hit the ground. “I felt a little off, but thought I was OK,” remembers Sarah.
She was able to get up and jog toward the dugout. “Then everything started turning black and closing in on me.” Her heart had stopped.
“I remember waking up thinking, ‘What is going on?’ I could see the panic in everyone’s eyes,” says Sarah. She was referred to the sports cardiology program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
A coronary CT scan revealed what caused Sarah’s heart to stop: a rare congenital heart defect, Typically,it’s discovered in the first year of life, and of those diagnosed later in life, 90% do not survive.
Sarah needed open-heart surgery right away. She recalls being nervous, but encouraged by theconfidence of her surgeon, Dr. Emile Bacha, chief of the Division of Cardiac, Thoracic, and Vascular Surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
During the five-hour surgery, Dr. Bacha and his team detached Sarah’s left coronary artery from the pulmonary artery and stitched it into the correct position. The surgery was a success.
“Every step the hospital took was just fantastic,” says her father, Paul. “From the nurses to the doctors, to the front desk staff in the waiting room who made sure we were comfortable during Sarah’s surgery, everyone gave us everything we needed.”