Life is full of surprises.

For Jeannet Parham, a chance meeting with Lisa Meyers, a registered nurse at UCHealth Memorial Hospital, was what she calls “a moment of divine intervention.”

“It started at my birthday party,” Parham explained. It was Nov. 12, 2024, and Meyers was on vacation in Hopkins, Belize, visiting a friend who lives there and was the host of a surprise celebratory dinner for Parham, who was turning 33.

Parham, known to her friends as “Jay,” expected a low-key dinner at the friend’s home. Instead, she was greeted by shouts of “Surprise!” from several friends, along with one stranger – Meyers.

After thanking everyone for the wonderful gathering, Parham made a remark that shocked everyone: Her heart can’t take such surprises, and with her condition, she didn’t know if I she would see another birthday.

“I never told anyone about my condition,” she said. Only her wife, Reagan, knew about it.  “To my luck, Lisa was there. This was my first time meeting her.”

An extremely large atrial septal defect, a hole in the heart’s wall

Meyers, a cardiovascular clinical coordinator at UCHealth Memorial Hospital Central and a nurse for more than 30 years, asked Parham, who was born and raised in Belize, to tell her more about her condition. “As a heart nurse, I wanted to make sure she was getting it treated,” Meyers said.

After learning Parham had an atrial septal defect (ASD) – a hole in the wall of the heart that separates the heart’s upper chambers – she told her new friend that perhaps she could help. “I know someone who deals with this on a daily basis,” she said.

Parham had learned a few years earlier – in 2022 – that she had a congenital heart defect. Her general practitioner in Hopkins, a coastal village in southern Belize, suggested she go to Belmopan, the capital, for an echocardiogram. Such a test would create a picture of the heart.

The cardiologist in Belmopan, though, wasn’t sure of the size of the ASD and suggested she go to Merida, the capital of Mexican state of Yucatan for further care. Additional tests in Merida showed an extremely large 3.8 cm hole in Parham’s heart wall.

“They sent me away with that information,” she recalled.

ASDs are considered large if they measure 12 mm – or 1.2 cm. Parham’s was more than three times that, and such severe cases put enormous stress on the heart and lungs.

In a normally functioning heart, blood comes into the right side, where it is sent to the lungs to get oxygen. From there, the oxygenated blood comes into the left side of the heart and is pumped out to the rest of the body. Parham’s heart, though, was allowing oxygen-rich blood to seep from the heart’s left upper chamber to the right upper chamber, putting immense stress on the right side of her heart.

Connecting with heart experts: Tackling a large ASD

When Meyers returned from vacation and was back at work at UCHealth Memorial Central, she stopped Dr. Cihan Cevik, an interventional cardiologist, in the hall.

“She mentioned to me, ‘I have this friend who has an ASD, and they can’t take care of it in Belize,’” Cevik recalled. He agreed to look at Parham’s records if she could send them his way.

“After I reviewed the records from Belize, I knew exactly what she was going to go through,” Cevik said. “This is a serious heart condition – that is what I told her on our video conference calls.”

Parham and Cevik talked three or four times via a WhatsApp video call. “I told her this needs to be taken care of, and we are happy to take care of you here, in Colorado.”

He also told her the condition could be life-threatening.

Parham and her wife began researching flights to Colorado.

In the days after her Dec. 30 arrival, Parham wasn’t feeling well. With the altitude, her symptoms got worse. She was short of breath, pale and couldn’t walk far. She was admitted to the hospital.

“You need to get this done right away,” Cevik said, referencing a cardiac catheterization procedure in which he would insert a tube into a blood vessel in the groin and guide it to the heart, where he would then deploy a specialized device that would patch the hole.

But a pre-procedure Transesophageal Echocardiogram – another test that creates detailed images of the heart – came back with bad news.

The hole in her heart measured 4.1 cm – too big for a minimally invasive procedure in the cath lab. Another procedure would have to be done.

“I went back to my room, and a surgeon spoke to me. He told me that the procedure that Dr. Cevik wanted to do was not possible and it would have to be open heart surgery,” Parham said.  “I went into surgery the next day.”

Heart specialists find best solution to fix heart defect

Dr. Mark Douthit, a cardiovascular surgeon, was on call when it was determined the ASD could not be repaired with a catheter-based intervention.

“It was not an emergency, but we felt the degree of urgency,” Douthit said.

“Jay had a congenital abnormality – this was there before she was born,” he explained. “Normally the heart, as we progress in utero, begins as simply a tube that folds on itself over time and creates a four-chamber muscular pump – the heart. Sometimes the septa, which as nature’s dividing walls between the upper two chambers and lower two chambers of the heart, doesn’t develop, and that was her problem.

“Over time, this can cause the heart to fail and people even to die, and that’s why such a large defect needs to be fixed. In fact, hers needed to be fixed many, many years ago.”

Douthit used bovine pericardial tissue – commonly used in many types of surgeries – to patch the hole. “The whole operation probably took 3 hours,” he said.

“These days we hardly ever operate (for an ASD) and are able to close it without having to open the chest,” said Douthit, who has been practicing cardiothoracic surgery since 1989. “Dr. Cevik did the analysis and diagnostics and figured out what best to do. I was just the mechanic and sewed a patch in. This was a simple procedure that hopefully will allow her to live a normal lifespan.”

Parham spent six days in the hospital before being discharged. She is back in Belize and back at her job as a property manager for vacation rentals.

“I am indebted to the entire surgical care and nurses,” she said. “The nurses and doctors who took care of me – they were very attentive. I feel like that’s what made the entire journey, the entire experience easier to handle. I had people around me who were supportive and caring.”

Cevik predicts Parham is going to be feeling great. “This was a life-saving procedure for this young person. It’s what we do. “

Now that she’s back home, she’d like to try all activities tourists enjoy in her home country. “Maybe hike and try snorkeling,” she said – things she couldn’t do because she was always short of breath.

“I do love nature. I do love outdoors. There are so many things I wanted to do that I was afraid of doing. Now the world is my oyster again.”

Before leaving the hospital, she and wife Reagan expressed their sincere thanks to the care team.

Each was given a thank-you card and an engraved keychain that reads, “May you be proud of the work you do, the person you are and the difference you make.”

Douthit was very touched by the gesture and calls Parham’s story “providential.”

“I feel blessed to do what I do, but it helps to have wonderful care providers, nursing staff, ancillary care staff members who always go above and beyond, treating our patients like they are family. There’s not a patient I see here who doesn’t remark when they walk out the door how wonderful the staff is, so we have to applaud all these people.

“I know Jay will never forget us here and will remember always this wonderful hospital in Colorado Springs.”